Writing Task 1
CELPIP Writing Task 1 gives you 27 minutes to write an email of 150–200 words. The prompt describes an everyday situation - a complaint to a landlord, a request to a manager, a note to a neighbour - and lists the points your email must address.
Writing an Email is the first of the two CELPIP-General Writing tasks. The prompt puts you in an ordinary situation, names the person you are writing to, and lists the points your email has to cover.
It is transactional writing: you are writing to get something done. What is assessed is whether every listed point is genuinely addressed, whether the email holds one register that suits its reader, and whether the language is varied, accurate and easy to follow.
The situations are everyday and never need specialist knowledge. What changes from prompt to prompt is who reads the email, and that single fact settles the register - which is explicitly assessed, not a matter of taste.
Spend the first three minutes on the prompt rather than the page: work out who the recipient is, decide formal or informal on the spot, and number the bullet points so none of them can quietly go missing. Take two more to jot one concrete detail beside each bullet - a date, an amount, a consequence - because those details are what turn a bare answer into a developed paragraph.
Draft for seventeen minutes: roughly two on the greeting and the sentence that says why you are writing, thirteen on one short body paragraph per bullet in the order the prompt gave them, and two on a close that names the action you want and by when.
Keep the last five minutes to read the email back twice - once for sense, once for mechanics such as tenses, articles and plurals - and to check the length sits inside 150–200 words.
Rehearse the shape, not the wording. Memorised sentences read as memorised, and a template that ignores the bullets in front of you scores worse than plain writing that answers them. Practise until the opening, the one-paragraph-per-bullet body and the closing request cost you no thought, so that the twenty-seven minutes go on this particular email.
Quick answers about Writing Task 1.
Aim for 150–200 words, the range the test instructions give. Slightly over is safer than under: an email short of 150 words usually means a bullet point was left undeveloped, and an undeveloped point costs more than a few extra words do.
Match the recipient in the prompt. A manager, company or city office gets a formal register - "Dear Mr. Chen", "I am writing to…" - while a friend or family member gets a natural, friendly one. Register is assessed, and mixing the two inside one email is a common complaint, so pick one in your opening line and hold it.
Yes. The bullet points are the checklist for content and coherence. The reliable pattern is one short body paragraph per bullet, in the order given, so neither you nor the rater has to hunt for anything.
Twenty-seven minutes, with Task 2 timed separately at 26, for a Writing section of 53-60 minutes. Plan to finish the email inside its own window rather than counting on borrowing from the survey response.
Use a memorised structure, not memorised sentences. Knowing that you open with the reason for writing, give one paragraph per bullet and close with a request saves real time. Pre-written paragraphs that do not fit the situation are obvious and read as padding.
Both Writing tasks feed a single Writing CLB level, so the email has no separate score. Raters look at how fully the content answers the task, how coherently it is organised, the range and accuracy of the vocabulary, and how readable the writing is overall.