A friend from another country is moving to your city for work. He / she has asked you for advice about living in your city. Write a letter to your friend. In your letter: - suggest an interesting part of the city to live in - describe the public transport in your city - say how your friend can meet new people there
Sample Response
Dear Irina, It's very exciting to hear that you'll be moving to London and congratulations on your new job! As you'll probably be working in the city centre, perhaps you could consider livingperhaps you could think about living near me in Croydon. It's a large town in south London. There are people here from all over the world and it has a friendly, relaxed atmospherevibe. In terms of public transport, you can get around London by bus, train and the Underground. You should getYou should just get an Oyster card, which I'll help you with. The card means you can get on and offIt means you can get on and off without having to buy a separate ticket each time. Public transport is pretty crowded in the mornings but no worse than in Moscow! I'll introduce you to my friends and I'm sure you'll meet people at work too. You could consider sharing a housetry living in a shared house if you want to meet some locals. Anyway, I can't wait to see you. Lots of love, Jane
Why this response received Band 8.0
The letter is warm, natural and highly effective, giving clear advice on where to live, how to travel and how to meet people. Its main limitation is presentation: all the ideas appear in one continuous block, which slightly weakens the organisation despite clear progression. The highest-priority improvement is to separate the accommodation, transport and social advice into distinct paragraphs.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The friendly letter fully addresses all three prompts with relevant, practical detail and an entirely suitable tone.
Develop Croydon's attractions a little further so the recommendation feels even more compelling.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically through accommodation, transport and social life, with smooth linking between points.
Use separate body paragraphs for the three main topics to make the structure immediately visible.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is flexible, precise and naturally informal, including effective phrases such as 'relaxed vibe' and 'shared house'.
Add one or two more specific words describing Croydon's amenities or character to sharpen the recommendation.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A varied range of sentence forms is used accurately, and the language remains consistently easy to follow.
Refine punctuation around the greeting and opening sentence to give the letter a more polished layout.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
A friend from another country is moving to your city for work. He / she has asked you for advice about living in your city. Write a letter to your friend. In your letter:
- suggest an interesting part of the city to live in
- describe the public transport in your city
- say how your friend can meet new people there
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.