IELTS General Training Task 1 band 7 letter sample: formal complaint

A band 7 letter is not a flawless letter. This IELTS GT Task 1 band 7 letter sample is a formal complaint that scores 7 across all four criteria while still containing a tone slip, a repeated linker and a wrong collocation — and the public descriptors say that is allowed.

Most pages that promise a band 7 letter print a band 9 one instead: no lapses, no over-used connectives, nothing an examiner would circle. That is a model of what you cannot yet write. Below is the full letter, a criterion-by-criterion scorecard quoting the official Band 7 wording, and the three specific faults that keep it off an 8.

Three marks in the margin, and the letter is still a band 7. That allowance is written into the descriptor.

The task and the letter, in full

General Training Task 1 gives you a situation and three bullet points, and asks for at least 150 words. Here is the prompt this letter answers. It was written for this article and reproduces the task type only — it is not lifted from a past paper.

Task (written for this article): You recently bought a piece of equipment from a shop and it stopped working after a few days. Write a letter to the shop manager. In your letter: explain what you bought and when; describe the problem; say what you would like the manager to do.

Here is the letter in full, 181 words, uncorrected. Copy it if you want to mark it yourself before reading the scorecard.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about a coffee machine which I purchased from your Milton Road branch on 3 March. The model was the Brewline 200 and I paid £145 for it, together with a two-year warranty.

The machine worked normally for roughly a week. After that, it began to leak water from the base whenever it was switched on, and last Tuesday it stopped heating altogether. Moreover, the display now shows an error code that appears nowhere in the manual. Moreover, the leak has damaged the wooden worktop underneath.

I returned to the branch on Thursday, but the assistant told me that I would have to contact the manufacturer myself. Honestly, that is not good enough, since I bought the machine from you and not from them.

I would therefore like you to replace the machine with a new unit of the same model, or to issue a full refund. I would also ask you to make a good compensation for the damage to my worktop.

I look forward to your reply.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Choi

One honesty note before the marking. We wrote this letter and assessed it against the public band descriptors, so "band 7" here means band 7 on the published criteria, not an official rating. The only General Training Task 1 letters IELTS publishes with real examiner comments sit at band 5 and 5.5 — and that task is also a complaint letter, which makes it a useful bottom-end contrast rather than a target.

Scored against the four criteria

Task 1 is marked on Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Note the first one. It is Task Achievement, not Task Response — Task Response is the Task 2 criterion, and a surprising number of sample-answer pages get this wrong. It matters here, because the General Training wording of Task Achievement carries two requirements that appear nowhere else in the marking scheme.

Criterion	Official Band 7 wording	Evidence in this letter	Verdict
Task Achievement	"The response covers the requirements of the task… All bullet points are covered and clearly highlighted but could be more fully or more appropriately illustrated or extended. It presents a clear purpose. The tone is consistent and appropriate to the task. Any lapses are minimal."	All three bullets are covered and each gets its own paragraph. The purchase is dated and priced, the fault is described in sequence, the remedy is named. The extension is thin — "damaged the wooden worktop" is stated and dropped.	7. Covered and clear, not fully extended. The "Honestly" sentence is a lapse in tone, but a single one, which the band allows as "minimal".
Coherence and Cohesion	"Information and ideas are logically organised, and there is a clear progression throughout the response. A range of cohesive devices including reference and substitution is used flexibly but with some inaccuracies or some over/under use."	Four paragraphs: purchase, fault, failed remedy, request. Reference works — "it", "them", "the machine" all point somewhere unambiguous. "therefore" and "since" carry the logic.	7. The progression is clear, and the doubled "Moreover" is exactly the "over/under use" the band tolerates.
Lexical Resource	"The resource is sufficient to allow some flexibility and precision. There is some ability to use less common and/or idiomatic items. An awareness of style and collocation is evident, though inappropriacies occur."	"purchased", "issue a full refund", "switched on", "altogether" show range and register control. "make a good compensation" is wrong.	7. Style awareness is evident; one collocation error is precisely the "inappropriacies occur" this band describes.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy	"A variety of complex structures is used with some flexibility and accuracy. Grammar and punctuation are generally well controlled, and error-free sentences are frequent."	Relative clauses ("which I purchased"), time clauses ("whenever it was switched on"), reported speech ("told me that I would have to"), and a passive. No sentence contains a grammatical error.	7. Variety is there and control is good, but the range stops short of the flexibility a higher band wants.

Four sevens, so the letter scores 7.

What is worth noticing is where the faults landed. Each of the three sits inside a phrase the descriptor itself writes into band 7: "any lapses are minimal", "some over/under use", "inappropriacies occur". Band 7 is not a vibe or a general impression of competence — it is that list, and a letter that contains none of those things is not a band 7 letter, it is a band 8 one.

Three things stopping this from being an 8

Band 8 Task Achievement asks that all bullet points are "clearly presented, and appropriately illustrated or extended", with only "occasional omissions or lapses in content". Three things in this letter get in the way, and each is fixed by rewriting a single sentence.

1. The tone breaks once. "Honestly, that is not good enough" is the only sentence in the letter that sounds spoken rather than written. Everything around it is controlled and formal; this drops register mid-paragraph. Band 7 permits minimal lapses, but a lapse is still a lapse, and this is the one an examiner would circle. Replace it with a sentence that makes the same point through structure rather than emotion:

• Before: "Honestly, that is not good enough, since I bought the machine from you and not from them."
• After: "As the purchase was made from your branch rather than from the manufacturer, I consider the responsibility to rest with the shop."

The complaint is not softened — it is made colder, which in a formal letter is stronger.

2. "Moreover" appears twice in three sentences. The second one adds nothing that a simple "and" would not. This is the trap most advice pages walk candidates straight into: linkers get treated as points to be earned, when the band 6 Coherence and Cohesion descriptor explicitly names overuse as a fault, alongside inaccuracy. Cutting one of them is the whole fix, and it shortens the letter:

• Before: "Moreover, the display now shows an error code that appears nowhere in the manual. Moreover, the leak has damaged the wooden worktop underneath."
• After: "The display now shows an error code that appears nowhere in the manual, and the leak has damaged the wooden worktop underneath."

3. "make a good compensation" is not English. "Compensation" takes offer, provide, pay or claim, and it does not take "a" in this sense. This is the clearest signal in the letter that the writer is reaching for a register they do not fully control — which is precisely what separates band 7 Lexical Resource from band 8:

• Before: "I would also ask you to make a good compensation for the damage to my worktop."
• After: "I would also ask you to offer compensation for the damage to my worktop."

Those three edits do not lengthen the letter. They move Task Achievement and Lexical Resource up without touching the substance of the content, which is what makes them worth practising — the content was never the problem.

Tone and register: the part that only GT is marked on

Academic Task 1 candidates describe a chart and never have to think about who they are writing to. General Training candidates do, and the band descriptors put it in writing. At band 7, "it presents a clear purpose. The tone is consistent and appropriate to the task." At band 6, "the purpose is generally clear" and "there may be minor inconsistencies in tone."

Band 6 to band 7 in one line: generally clear becomes clear, and minor inconsistencies in tone become none worth naming.

That is the whole gap in one line. Not vocabulary, not grammar — consistency of voice from the greeting to the sign-off.

IELTS says letters may be "personal, semi-formal or formal in style", and the prompt tells you which. A letter to a shop manager you have never met is formal. That decides everything downstream: no contractions, no exclamation marks, no "Thanks a lot", and a request phrased as a request rather than a demand.

On openings and closings, one thing is worth being precise about, because it is widely repeated as an IELTS rule and is not one. Pairing "Dear Sir or Madam" with "Yours faithfully", and a named recipient with "Yours sincerely", is a British letter-writing convention. It is conventional, examiners recognise it, and following it costs you nothing — but no descriptor mentions it. What the descriptors mark is whether the tone holds. A letter that opens "Dear Sir or Madam" and closes "Yours sincerely" has not broken a rule; a letter that opens formally and turns chatty in paragraph three has.

The same applies to subject lines. A business convention, not an IELTS requirement, and their absence costs nothing.

To test your own letter, read only the first and last sentence of each paragraph, one after another, ignoring everything in between. If any of them sounds like a different person wrote it, that is your inconsistency, and it is the cheapest half band on the page.

FAQ

How long should a General Training Task 1 letter be?

At least 150 words. That is the official minimum and the only number IELTS publishes. There is no upper limit and no stated penalty for writing longer. Responses of 20 words or fewer are rated at Band 1. Anything you read about losing a band for falling short of 180 or 200 words has no official basis.

Can I invent the details?

Yes. The names, dates and prices in the letter above are invented, and that is normal — you are marked on how you handle the task, not on whether the coffee machine exists. Just keep the invented details consistent with the bullet points.

Does Task 1 matter as much as Task 2?

No. IELTS states that Task 2 contributes twice as much as Task 1 to the Writing score. The two task scores are combined with that weighting, so a weak letter does less damage than a weak essay — but it still costs you.

Will bullet points in my letter be penalised?

Yes. The official guidance is explicit that responses which are not written as full, connected text — using bullet points or note form — can be penalised. So can any answer that is partly or wholly plagiarised. Write in paragraphs.

Where can I read the descriptors myself?

The band descriptors and the test format pages are published on ielts.org. Every quotation on this page comes from there.

Related reading

• Task Achievement vs Task Response — why the letter is marked on a criterion the essay is not
• IELTS Writing band descriptors explained — all four scales, band 5 upwards
• IELTS Task 1 Academic band 7 sample — the same treatment applied to a bar chart answer
• How to get band 7 in IELTS Writing — the four criteria as conditions to meet

Descriptor wording is quoted from the public IELTS Writing band descriptors (updated May 2023). Task requirements are set out on ielts.org.