Last month you had a holiday overseas where you stayed with some friends. They have just sent you some photos of your holiday. Write a letter to your friends. In your letter: - thank them for the photos and for the holiday - explain why you didn't - write earlier - invite them to come and stay with you
Sample Response
Dear David, James and EthanJames & Ethan, Hope you all are doing great. I cannot express how much I enjoyed my time with you guys, and how muchterribly I miss those days that I spent with you. I received your letter yesterday and was quite surprised to find some of the best pictures we took during our holiday in Singapore. I guess this is the perfectbest opportunity to thank you for a great holiday and the fabulous pictures that will always remind mewould remind me of a wonderful trip to Singaporegrand tour to Singapore. As soon as I got back to Australia, I got busy with my thesis paper that I am supposed to submit before the end of the current semester. This is my last semester at the university and I will be free for a while after that and I would love to have you at my place. Why don't you all come and visit me at the end of Decemberend of this December? I am sure we will have a magnificent time together. Take careStay fine and keep in touch. Warm wishes, Alex
Why this response received Band 7.5
The letter is warm, natural, and fully responsive: it thanks the friends for both the holiday and photographs, explains the delayed reply, and gives a clear invitation with a proposed time. Its main weakness is presentation, as the whole message forms one dense paragraph and a few expressions sound slightly awkward. Divide the ideas into purposeful paragraphs and refine those collocations for a more polished response.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The friendly letter achieves its purpose and develops all three required points with relevant personal detail.
Make the invitation even more concrete by briefly mentioning what the friends could do during their stay.
Coherence and Cohesion
The ideas progress logically, but the absence of paragraph breaks makes the letter visually dense and weakens its organisation.
Use separate paragraphs for the thanks, the reason for the delay, and the invitation.
Lexical Resource
The vocabulary is varied and expressive, with only occasional awkward choices such as referring to the trip as a grand tour.
Choose more natural collocations, for example memories of our wonderful trip and at the end of December.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A good range of complex structures is handled accurately, although a sentence fragment and some long coordination remain.
Write a complete opening sentence and split the longest coordinated sentence to improve grammatical control.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
Last month you had a holiday overseas where you stayed with some friends. They have just sent you some photos of your holiday. Write a letter to your friends. In your letter:
- thank them for the photos and for the holiday
- explain why you didn't
- write earlier
- invite them to come and stay with you
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.