You celebrated your birthday with some friends last week in a restaurant. It was a great success and you and your friends enjoyed the evening very much. Write a letter to the restaurant. In your letter: - thank the restaurant for the successful evening - mention the food, service and atmosphere - suggest improvements that could make things better
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam, Last week, I along with a few of my friends enjoyed a dinner party at your restaurant to celebrate my 21st birthday. I am writing to thank you for the delightful evening that we had. All my friends thoroughly enjoyed the food and were pleased with the friendly attitude of your staff. We ordered a Chinese menu and it was delicious. We received prompt service and the waiters were quite friendly. They put upwith well with our bad jokes! The restaurant itself was warm and friendly and the atmosphere suggestedshowed that all the diners there were enjoying their evening. I believe you have a great place and a small improvement would make it even better. Two of my friends are vegetariansvegetarian and they felt that the selection of vegetarian dishesthe choice for vegetarians was not sufficient. I hope you will considerI am hoping you would consider adding a few more items for vegetarian dinersfor the vegetarians who would visit your restaurant. Once again I would like to thank you for making my birthday celebration special and enjoyablespecial and worth enjoying. Yours faithfully, Kelvin Smith
Why this response received Band 7.0
The letter successfully fulfils its purpose with warm thanks, relevant comments on the food, service and atmosphere, and a practical vegetarian-menu suggestion. The main weakness is linguistic polish: several awkward combinations, especially ‘ordered a Chinese menu,’ ‘put with well with,’ and ‘worth enjoying,’ reduce naturalness, while the single-block layout limits readability; prioritise correcting these collocations and organising the content into short functional paragraphs.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The letter clearly thanks the restaurant, comments on all three requested aspects, and proposes a relevant improvement with adequate explanation and a suitable tone.
Make the improvement request still more useful by suggesting one or two specific vegetarian dishes or options.
Coherence and Cohesion
The ideas follow a sensible sequence and cohesive links are generally clear, but presenting the entire letter as one block weakens its organisation and readability.
Use separate paragraphs for the opening thanks, the positive details, the suggested improvement, and the closing appreciation.
Lexical Resource
The response shows enough range to describe the occasion and restaurant, but several conspicuous collocation errors reduce precision and naturalness.
Replace awkward combinations with idiomatic phrasing, such as ‘ordered Chinese food,’ ‘put up with our bad jokes,’ and ‘made the celebration memorable.’
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of simple and complex sentences is mostly controlled, though occasional agreement, punctuation, and phrasing errors remain noticeable.
Edit structures such as ‘I, along with a few friends,’ and use ‘Two of my friends are vegetarians’ for cleaner grammatical control.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You celebrated your birthday with some friends last week in a restaurant. It was a great success and you and your friends enjoyed the evening very much. Write a letter to the restaurant. In your letter:
- thank the restaurant for the successful evening
- mention the food, service and atmosphere
- suggest improvements that could make things better
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.