Band 4.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 4.5 · Barron's Writing · 2026-09-18

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

You have rented a house by a lake for the summer.

Write a letter to a friend. In your letter
• describe the house.
• describe how you are spending your time there.
• invite your friend to come and visit.

You do NOT need to write any addresses.

Begin your letter as follows:

Dear ____

Student answer (Band 4.5)

Dear Mr smith,

I hope this letter finds you pink of your health. My name is Akashdeep Singh, who is living in your apartment from last 3 months in room number 19, second floor.

Here I am writing this letter in regards to the heating system of my room. I spent 3 miserable nights, while wearing a coat on a bed as well as socks, because of the cold.

Furthermore, I showed it to the technician last day, and he told me that the whole heating unit needs to be replaced. Nevertheless, I tried to call you from the last 2 days, but not able to connect.

I would like to suggest you that either kindly call a technician to fix it or i will call and pay for it, and you can fix this in the next payout.

Yours sincerely,

Akashdeep

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response — Band 3.0

The student has written a formal complaint letter about a faulty heating system to a landlord rather than responding to the General Training Task 1 prompt, which explicitly requires writing a letter to a friend about renting a house by the lake, describing it, sharing how time is spent there, and inviting the friend to visit. Because the response is completely off-topic and misses all bullet points of the prompt, Task Achievement suffers severely. Additionally, the response contains 142 words, failing the 150-word minimum length requirement, which further lowers the score. While the tone is appropriate for a formal complaint, it does not match the prompt requirements at all.

Coherence and Cohesion — Band 5.0

The letter is organised into clear paragraphs with a standard salutation and sign-off, providing a basic framework of coherence. Cohesive devices are used to connect ideas, such as 'Furthermore', 'Nevertheless', and 'because of'. However, the referencing and logical progression are occasionally flawed, such as addressing the recipient as 'Mr smith' while writing about renting a house for the summer, but then pivoting to a long-term apartment tenancy and heating issues. Paragraphing is used sufficiently to separate the introduction, the main issues, and the proposed solution, but overall cohesion is impacted by the abrupt shifts in the narrative.

Lexical Resource — Band 5.0

The student demonstrates an adequate vocabulary range for basic communication, utilizing terms such as 'technician', 'miserable', and 'replacement'. However, there are notable lexical and collocational errors throughout the text. For instance, the phrase 'pink of your health' is an unnatural idiom in this context, and 'from last 3 months' uses the incorrect preposition. Additionally, 'in regards to' should ideally be 'with regard to' or 'regarding'. These inaccuracies show a limited range of vocabulary with noticeable errors, though communication of the core message remains understandable.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy — Band 4.5

The student attempts a mix of simple and complex sentence structures, such as relative clauses ('who is living in your apartment from last 3 months') and concessive clauses ('while wearing a coat on a bed as well as socks'). However, grammatical accuracy is weak, with frequent errors present. Examples include tense and preposition errors ('from the last 2 days' instead of 'for the last 2 days'), capitalization errors ('smith', 'i'), and awkward phrasing ('either kindly call a technician to fix it or i will call and pay for it'). These errors cause some difficulty for the reader and prevent the response from achieving a higher band.

See this exact question answered at other band scores — the same prompt compared across bands.

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