Below is what the IELTS Writing test asks for, what the two tasks are actually marked on, and what changes when you type instead of writing by hand. The tests above are the practice; this is the part that decides whether the practice helps.

What the Writing test asks of you

60 minutes and two tasks. Task 1 asks for at least 150 words in about 20 minutes; Task 2 asks for at least 250 words in about 40 minutes. And the figure that should shape how you spend the hour: Task 2 counts twice as much as Task 1 towards your Writing score.

Nothing stops you spending 35 minutes on Task 1. The clock is one clock and you split it yourself. People do it constantly, because Task 1 is the one that feels finishable — and then they hand in 190 rushed words for the task worth two thirds of the mark. If you fix one thing about your Writing, fix the split.

Both tasks are marked by a human examiner against four published criteria. There is no answer key, nothing is automatic, and no number of practice essays guarantees a band.

Task 1, Academic — describing information

You are given visual information — a graph, a table, a chart or a diagram — and you describe it in your own words in at least 150 words.

It is a report, not an argument. You are not asked what you think, why the trend happened, or what should be done about it, and writing any of that spends words on something that cannot earn a mark. What the task wants is a clear overview of the main pattern, then the detail that supports it: the biggest and smallest figures, the sharpest change, the groups that behave differently from each other.

The most reliable structure is dull on purpose — one sentence saying what the chart shows, one short paragraph of overview, then two paragraphs of selected detail with the numbers attached. Select. A description that lists every figure in the table reads as a list and demonstrates nothing.

Task 1, General Training — the letter

You respond to a situation by writing a letter of at least 150 words: a complaint, a request, an apology, an explanation to a landlord, a note to a colleague.

The task tells you who you are writing to, and that decides the register — personal, semi-formal or formal. Getting it wrong is costly in a way that is easy to avoid: a friendly letter to a company, or a stiff formal letter to a friend, reads as not having understood the task at all.

Every letter prompt gives you three bullet points. Cover all three, roughly evenly; a letter that answers two of them well is incomplete by definition. Open and close in a way that matches the register, and make the purpose clear in the first line — the reader should know why you are writing before they know anything else.

Task 2 — the essay

You are given a point of view, an argument or a problem, and you discuss it in at least 250 words. Same task in Academic and General Training; the General Training prompts are a little more everyday in subject.

The thing that costs the most marks here is not language, it is not answering the question that was asked. The prompts come in recognisable shapes — do you agree or disagree, discuss both views, what are the causes and solutions, what are the advantages and disadvantages — and each one demands a different essay. “Discuss both views and give your opinion” needs both views and an opinion; leaving the opinion out is an incomplete answer however well it is written.

Four or five paragraphs, one idea each, with a position stated in the introduction and held to the end. Examples help when they are specific; invented statistics do not, and a memorised paragraph dropped into an essay it does not fit is visible immediately.

The four things you are actually marked on

Both tasks are assessed against the same four criteria. Knowing them changes what you practise:

• Task achievement (Task 1) or task response (Task 2) — did you do what was asked, fully, at the required length? This is where off-topic essays and missing overviews lose their marks.
• Coherence and cohesion — is it organised, and does it flow? Paragraphing, and linking that comes from the argument rather than from a list of connectives sprinkled over it.
• Lexical resource — range and accuracy of vocabulary. Range means the right word, not the long word; a precise common word beats a misused rare one every time.
• Grammatical range and accuracy — variety of structures and how often they are correct. Short correct sentences score better than ambitious broken ones.

Each is weighted equally within a task, so a candidate who writes beautifully but ignores half the prompt is capped by the first criterion no matter how good the other three are.

What changes when you type instead of write

More than people expect, and mostly in your favour.

• There is an automatic word counter. No more counting lines and guessing. You can see at a glance whether you are over 150 or 250 — and being under the minimum is a penalty you now have no excuse for.
• There is no spell-check. The counter counts; it does not correct. Your spelling and your typos are marked exactly as they land.
• Editing costs nothing. Moving a sentence, rewriting an opening, cutting a paragraph — all free, where on paper they cost you crossings-out and time. This is the real advantage of the computer test, and most candidates never use it. Leave three minutes at the end of each task to re-read and fix.
• Handwriting stops mattering. An examiner cannot misread what you typed, which quietly removes a risk that has cost legible-but-messy candidates marks for decades.
• Your typing speed now matters. Not much — 250 words in 40 minutes is slow typing by any standard — but if you hunt for keys, practise on a keyboard before test day, not on paper.

Where the marks actually go

The same handful of avoidable losses, test after test:

• Under the word count. At least 150 and at least 250 are minimums, not targets. Under them is penalised directly, and the word counter on screen means you will always know.
• Giving Task 2 the leftovers. It is worth twice Task 1. Twenty minutes and forty, in that order, is the plan.
• Not answering the exact question. An essay about whether technology is good, in answer to a prompt about whether schools should ban phones, is a capped essay.
• No overview in Academic Task 1. Describing every line without ever saying what the chart shows overall is one of the most reliable ways to sit still.
• Memorised phrases. “In this day and age” and “since the dawn of civilisation” are so common that they register as padding rather than range.
• Running out of time with no re-read. Three minutes of checking catches the article you dropped, the plural you missed and the sentence that lost its verb.

How the Writing tests on this site are marked

There is no answer key for Writing, so here is exactly what you get and what it is worth.

You write in the test-day editor — same layout, same live word count, same 60-minute clock — and when you submit you get a breakdown against the four criteria above, with comments on what held each one back and a model answer to compare yours against. During the three-day free trial you get 3 marked assessments; after that, up to 20 a day on the yearly plan. Every Writing test is open to read and attempt during the trial — the limit is on marking, not on access.

What it is not: a certified IELTS examiner. It is software built around the published criteria, and it is useful for the same reason a coach is useful — it tells you which of the four things is costing you most, repeatedly, cheaply, at two in the morning. No practice score, ours or anyone else's, predicts the band you will be given on test day, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

How to get something out of these tests

Writing is the slowest section to improve and the easiest to practise badly:

• Write to the clock, in one sitting. An essay you took ninety minutes over tells you nothing about an essay you have forty minutes for.
• Fix one criterion at a time. Four at once is how people write twenty essays and stay where they started. If task response is the weak one, spend a week only on reading prompts and planning answers — you do not even have to finish the essays.
• Plan for five minutes. It feels like lost writing time and it is the difference between four paragraphs that argue something and four that circle.
• Compare with the model answer after you have written, never before. Read it for structure and for the decisions it made, not for phrases to borrow.
• Keep your own error list. Articles, plurals, subject-verb agreement, commas spliced into sentences — most people have four recurring errors, not forty, and they are worth more than any new vocabulary.

Questions people ask about IELTS Writing

The format figures above — 60 minutes, two tasks, 150 and 250 words, Task 2 worth twice Task 1, and the four assessment criteria — come from the official Academic Writing format and General Training Writing format pages, checked 2 October 2026.