IELTS General Training Writing Practice Tests

IELTS General Training Writing — the Task 1 letter is not optional practice

Task 1 in the General Training Writing test is a letter — not a graph or chart as in Academic. You'll be given a situation and asked to write a minimum 150-word letter that might be formal, semi-formal, or informal depending on who you're writing to. The register matters: writing to a company or official body requires a formal tone; writing to a friend allows informal language. Mixing registers within the letter — starting formally then slipping into casual phrasing — is a Lexical Resource penalty. The bullet points in the prompt tell you the three things your letter must cover. Missing one is a Task Achievement error.

Task 2 is an essay of at least 250 words and uses the same four marking criteria as the Academic test: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. The essay topics for General Training are intended to be accessible to a wider audience than Academic topics, but the scoring standard is the same. Task 2 carries double the weight of Task 1 — which means spending more than 25 minutes on a letter is a time allocation mistake that will cost you on Task 2.

These IELTS General Training Writing practice tests include both Task 1 letters and Task 2 essays with AI scoring against all four criteria. The per-criterion feedback is what makes the score useful — a Band 5.5 for Coherence and Cohesion alongside a Band 7 for Grammatical Range tells you the structural issue is more urgent than the grammar. That's the kind of targeted feedback that changes your preparation rather than just tracking your progress.