Writing Task 1 (General Training)Target band 7
Task
You want to take a short course that will help you in your job, but it takes place during working hours.
Write a letter to your manager. In your letter:
- describe the course
- explain how it would benefit your work
- suggest how your absence could be covered
Write at least 150 words. Begin your letter "Dear ...,". You do not need to write any addresses.
Task
A semi-formal letter — you know the recipient but the relationship is professional. Use their name and "Yours sincerely". The third bullet is the one candidates skip; it is also the one that shows judgement.
Model answer(177 words)
Dear Ms Kaur,
I am writing to ask whether I might attend a short professional course next month, and to set out how the time could be covered.
The course is a four-day certificate in data analysis run by the city college, held on consecutive Tuesdays throughout May. It covers spreadsheet modelling and basic reporting, and it is taught in the afternoons, from two until five.
I think it would be directly useful to the team. At present we send our monthly figures to an external consultant for analysis, which is both slow and expensive. If I completed this course, I would be able to produce those reports internally, and I suspect we would get them a good deal faster than we do now.
As for cover, I would be happy to make up the hours by starting early on the days in question, and Daniel has already offered to take any client calls on those afternoons. The course fee is modest and I would be willing to pay half of it myself.
Yours sincerely,
Marek Nowak
Why this answer scores well
Task Achievement: all three bullets covered, and the third — how the absence would be covered — is answered concretely with two mechanisms and a named colleague. This is the bullet most candidates treat as an afterthought, and it is the one that makes the letter persuasive rather than merely polite.
Register: semi-formal, and consistent. The recipient is named, so "Yours sincerely" is correct. "I am writing to ask whether I might" is appropriately deferential without being stiff, and the offer to pay half is a nice touch of realism.
Note the argument in paragraph three: it does not say "this course would improve my skills", it says what the team currently pays someone else to do and why that would change. Task 1 rewards specificity exactly as Task 2 does.
Lexical Resource: "consecutive", "internally", "make up the hours", "modest". Note "a good deal faster" — a natural intensifier that reads as fluent rather than learned.
Grammatical Range: a second conditional ("If I completed this course, I would be able to"), a hedged claim ("I suspect we would"), and varied sentence openings. The hedging is deliberate: overclaiming in a request letter reads badly.
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