The road in front of your house was damaged a long time ago and nothing has been done about it. Write a letter to the municipal authority. In your letter: - introduce yourself - explain the condition of the road - suggest what the authority should do
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam, I am a resident of a suburb of Johor Bahruone of the major suburbs of Johor Bahru city, and I am writing this letter to express my serious concerndisappointment and frustration over the inaction and negligence of theour municipal authority regarding a damaged road. I requested theour municipal office to repair the road, which got damaged because of heavy rainexcessive rains and heavy vehicle traffictransportation of heavily-loaded vehicles, in front of my house almost a year ago. But, surprisingly, no visible action has been taken yet to show that the damaged road is going to be rebuilt anytime soon. As a result, this road has become really dangerous for even riding a motorbike on it, let alone large vehicles. The road becomes even more hazardousIt even becomes more terrible for travelling, especially when rainwater fills the potholeswhen it rains and the water accumulates in the potholes of the damaged road surface because people cannot see the road clearlycan not really see the road properly while drivingwhen driving on it. ThereforeSo, I would like to request you to take the necessary steps urgentlyon an urgent basis to repairin order to fix the damaged road in front of my house as soon as possible before a serious accidentsome major accidents happen. Yours faithfullysincerely, Yan Lee
Why this response received Band 7.0
The letter communicates the complaint clearly, develops the hazardous road conditions with convincing detail, and makes an urgent request in an appropriately formal tone. Its main weakness is a dense single-paragraph structure combined with several awkward collocations and overloaded sentences; prioritise purposeful paragraphing and tighter sentence construction so the authority can identify the problem and requested action more efficiently.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The writer introduces their connection to the area, explains the road's condition and dangers in detail, and clearly requests prompt repairs.
Make the introduction more concrete with the precise location and specify the requested repair action rather than relying partly on general wording.
Coherence and Cohesion
The complaint progresses logically from background to consequences and action, but the single dense paragraph and some heavy linking weaken organisation.
Divide the response into clear paragraphs for introduction, road condition and risks, and the requested remedy.
Lexical Resource
The response uses a strong range of topic-specific vocabulary, although phrases such as "excessive rains" and "more terrible for travelling" are not fully natural.
Choose more precise collocations such as "heavy rainfall", "heavy vehicles", and "particularly hazardous to travel on".
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Complex clauses are used with generally good control, but several long sentences contain awkward word order or excessive embedding.
Break overloaded sentences into cleaner units and refine preposition placement, especially around the road's location and risks.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
The road in front of your house was damaged a long time ago and nothing has been done about it. Write a letter to the municipal authority. In your letter:
- introduce yourself
- explain the condition of the road
- suggest what the authority should do
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.