You are going to study at a college in the UK next year. You would like to stay in the college Hall of Residence. Write a letter to the college. In your letter: - outline what your room needs are - outline what your food needs are - ask what alternatives are available if the college cannot provide what you want
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam, I have been accepted ontointo the MBA course for the next academic year at your collegenext academic year in your prestigious college. I am writing to inquire about suitable accommodation in the college's hall of residencein the college Hall of Residence because I would like to reserveas I want to reserve it before I travel to the UK to begin my coursejoin my classes. I am looking for a single room with an en-suite bathroomattached bathroom and access to laundry facilitiesand laundry facility. The room should be fully furnished and have good ventilation and ample natural light. Since I am a vegetarian, I would like to cook my own food, so accommodation with access to a fully equipped kitchenaccommodation with a fully equipped kitchen would be essential for mewould be mandatory. If the above arrangement is not available in the Hall of Residence, thenResidence then I would not mind living with a local family that livesfamily who lived near the college. I would like to avoid a long daily commutedaily long commuting to attend my classes and prefer a couple without children. Please let me knowPlease notify me if you needif you would like to have any additional information from mefrom my end. Waiting to hear from you soon regarding the availability of the accommodation and further process to reserve it. Yours faithfully, Preeti Ghuraiya
Why this response received Band 7.0
The letter’s strongest feature is its thorough practical coverage of room, food, and alternative accommodation requirements in a consistently appropriate formal tone. Its main limitation is grammatical polish, with tense errors, awkward collocations, and a sentence fragment near the close; the highest-priority improvement is to divide the requests into clear paragraphs and proofread verb forms and complete-sentence structure.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The purpose is clear and all three bullet points are developed with specific room, cooking, location, and host-family preferences.
Ask explicitly whether the college can arrange the proposed host-family alternative and what booking steps would apply.
Coherence and Cohesion
The ideas follow a logical sequence from residence requirements to food needs and alternatives, though the single-block format limits readability.
Use separate paragraphs for the room, food, alternative accommodation, and final administrative request.
Lexical Resource
A good range of precise accommodation vocabulary is used, with a few awkward combinations such as “daily long commuting” and “from my end.”
Prefer natural phrases such as “a long daily commute,” “any further information,” and “the reservation process.”
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response uses varied sentence structures, but errors in tense, conditional phrasing, articles, and the fragment “Waiting to hear” recur.
Write “a local family who live near the college” and “I look forward to hearing from you” as complete, controlled sentences.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You are going to study at a college in the UK next year. You would like to stay in the college Hall of Residence. Write a letter to the college. In your letter:
- outline what your room needs are
- outline what your food needs are
- ask what alternatives are available if the college cannot provide what you want
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.