CELPIP Writing Task 1: How the Email Is Marked (and the 27-Minute Plan)

Task 1 gives you one email to write, and twenty-seven minutes to write it.

The prompt sets a situation, and then usually asks you for around three things.

Those three things are not suggestions.

They are the marking scheme, printed at the top of your screen.

Leave one out and the email is incomplete, and completeness is part of the score.

You are asked for a hundred and fifty to two hundred words.

Below a hundred and fifty, you are short of the range, and the counter keeps counting.

The counter on the screen is a floor and a ceiling, not a target.

And the clock does not stop for a second draft, so the plan has to happen before the typing does.

Task 1 is always an email, but the situation moves.

Some prompts ask you to complain, some to request, some to explain a decision you have taken.

The shape of the email never changes; only the two blocks in the middle do.

Four things are scored, and only four.

Content and coherence: did you say enough, in an order a reader can follow?

Vocabulary: are the words yours, and do they fit a bank, a landlord, a manager?

Readability: paragraphs, punctuation, and the conventions an email is expected to keep.

Task fulfilment: did you do what the prompt asked — all of it, in the right register?

Three of those reward the English you already have.

The fourth rewards reading the question properly.

It asks one question: did you do what the prompt asked?

Nothing here is marked for how polite you were.

Politeness is the manner. The task is the request.

Register, though, is marked — and it is part of task fulfilment, not vocabulary.

A bank manager is not a friend, and a landlord is not a lawyer.

Write to the person the prompt names, in the register that person would expect.

Every mark you lose here is a block you left out, so let us build one, line by line.

An email that scores has six blocks, and they arrive in the same order every time.

Open with a name if the prompt gives you one.

If it does not, Dear Sir or Madam is safer than a guess.

Your first sentence says why you are writing, and nothing else.

Not how you feel about it, not how long it has been going on — why the email exists.

Then the problem, with the dates and the numbers that make it real.

A marker cannot reward detail you did not give them.

Now name the harm.

A credit record is a consequence. Being unhappy is not.

And the block almost everyone forgets: say what you want them to do.

Close the account, reverse the fee, confirm in writing — by a date you choose.

Three verbs and a deadline. That is the request the reader needs.

Then sign off the way you opened.

If you wrote Dear Ms. Reynolds, you end with sincerely. If you wrote Dear Sir or Madam, you end with faithfully.

Six blocks. A hundred and seventy-eight words. Twenty-two minutes on the clock.

Here are two emails we wrote from the same prompt, almost the same length. The scores you will see are our own illustration, not official marks.

This one is polite and correct, and in our marking it comes out around a six.

Listen to how it opens.

I am writing because my credit card was cancelled and I still receive statements.

That is the situation the prompt already told them.

Then it explains, at length, how inconvenient this has been.

And it ends: I hope you can understand my situation.

Hope is not a request.

Nothing in that email tells the bank what to do, so task fulfilment suffers.

The second email is the one we just built.

It is four words longer.

It names the dates, the amount, and the harm.

And it ends with three verbs and a deadline.

Same grammar. Same vocabulary. Same twenty-seven minutes.

In our marking, content and coherence goes from six to nine.

Vocabulary: six to nine.

Readability: seven to ten.

Task fulfilment: three to ten.

One block, and the email reads very differently.

Five habits cost more marks than any grammar mistake you are likely to make.

One: writing under a hundred and fifty words because you ran out of things to say.

If you are short, you left out a detail, not a sentence.

Two: copying the prompt's own words into your first paragraph.

The marker can see the prompt. Those words earn you nothing.

Three: one long paragraph.

Readability is a criterion, and paragraphs are most of it.

Four: being polite instead of being clear.

You can be both, but only one of them is marked.

Five: typing for twenty-five minutes and checking for none.

Spelling and punctuation count toward readability, and a second pass catches most slips.

And the habit under all five: answering the prompt you expected instead of the one on the screen.

Read it twice before you write a word.

So spend the twenty-seven minutes like this.

Four minutes reading the prompt and writing three words beside each bullet.

Planning is not an outline. It is three words beside each bullet.

Beside describe the problem: dates, fee, statements.

Beside explain your concern: credit history.

Beside say what you want: close, reverse, confirm by the thirtieth.

Those eleven words are the email. The rest is joining them up in sentences.

Eighteen minutes writing the six blocks, in order, without stopping to fix anything.

Five minutes reading it back, out loud in your head, for the words your eye skips.

Before you hand it in, four questions.

Did I answer all three bullets?

Did I say what I want them to do, and by when?

Am I between a hundred and fifty and two hundred words?

Does it open and close like an email, not like a message?

Four yeses is a strong Task 1.

Everything in this lesson is marked automatically on the mocks in your account.

Your writing comes back with the sentence you wrote, the sentence to write instead, and why.

Sit one properly, and read the report before you sit the next.

Twenty-seven minutes is enough, once you know what the marker is counting.