You are a student at an English language school in Brighton and are living in private accommodation with other flatmates. You have not had hot water or heating for some time. The landlord's workmen have tried to fix the problem but without success. Write a letter to the landlord. In your letter: - state your reason for writing - describe the problems and explain how you feel propose a solution - ask the landlord to take actions
Sample Response
Dear Mrs Thompson, I am writing this letter to notify you of the heating problem in our rented apartment. My flatmates and I areI as well well as my flatmates are having a hard time coping with the extreme coldwinter and hopehoping that you willwould have the problem resolved immediately. I am Niro, a second-year student at the Pedagogy English Medium School in Brighton. I along with two other students, rented your apartment on Park Roadthe park road last February. Overall, we are happy with our accommodation. Unfortunately, the central heating system stopped working a week ago, so we do not havestopped working a week ago and we do not have any hot water in our flat. Two repairmen visited our flat last Friday and tried to fix the heater, but without successwithout any result. We are suffering considerablysuffering to a great extent as a result. The winter is almost unbearabledue to this and the winter is almost unbearable without the heating system and hot water. I hope you can understand our problem and arrange an effective repair immediatelytake action immediately. I suggest installing an electric heater in the bathroomfixing an auto heater to the bathroom and replacing the current central-heating unitreplacing the current one. If we do not get a proper solution within a week, we willwould be forced to move out of the flatvacate your flat. Kindly resolve this problem as soon as possible and oblige us. Thank you in advance. Yours sincerely, Niro Maala
Why this response received Band 6.5
The letter clearly states the heating and hot-water problem, explains its impact, and requests prompt action in a suitably firm tone. Its main limitation is uneven language control, with awkward collocations and several grammatical slips, while the absence of paragraphing weakens readability. Prioritise dividing the message into purposeful paragraphs and revising sentence structure and word choice for greater naturalness and precision.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The purpose is clear, all requested points are covered, and the firm but polite tone suits a letter to a landlord.
Develop the proposed solution more realistically and precisely, explaining what repair or replacement the landlord should arrange.
Coherence and Cohesion
The information progresses logically from the complaint to its effects and the requested action, but it is presented as one unbroken paragraph.
Use separate paragraphs for the background, problems and feelings, and proposed action to make the progression easier to follow.
Lexical Resource
The letter uses a sufficient range of relevant vocabulary, although several collocations such as fixing an auto heater sound unnatural.
Choose more idiomatic problem-and-repair language, such as installing a water heater or replacing the faulty heating system.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A mix of simple and complex forms conveys the message clearly, but agreement, parallelism, punctuation, and conditional errors recur.
Edit sentence structures carefully, especially subject-verb agreement and matched verb forms in longer sentences.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You are a student at an English language school in Brighton and are living in private accommodation with other flatmates. You have not had hot water or heating for some time. The landlord's workmen have tried to fix the problem but without success. Write a letter to the landlord. In your letter:
- state your reason for writing
- describe the problems and explain how you feel propose a solution
- ask the landlord to take actions
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.