Band 5.5 IELTS Writing Task 1 Model Answer

Overall Band Score: 5.5 · Cambridge IELTS 21 · 2026-11-10

IELTS Writing Task 1 question

All new employees at your workplace have a mentor - an experienced colleague who gives them advice and support in their career. As a new employee, you have been given details of your mentor.

Write a letter to introduce yourself to your new mentor. In your letter

• give a brief outline of your previous studies and work experience

• explain what help you hope your mentor can give

• suggest arrangements for a first meeting with your mentor

You do NOT need to write any addresses.

Begin your letter as follows:

Dear....... ,

Student answer (Band 5.5)

Dear Mr Lopez,

I am writing this to introduce myself.

I am a newly recruited employee in this company. I was hired on last friday as a cashier.

I graduated with BA degree in business and management from Hawassa University, and I worked in different companies in reception, data analyst and accountant positions. Although, now it will be a new working environment with new position to work at. So, when I ask my collegues they recommend me to have some communication with you on some issues inorder to have some information about the job. I would appreciate if you could show me the new website of the organization and how I can manipulate.Moreover, it would be a great pleasure for me if you could make it clear about the customer service.

I hope you understand my situation and arrange time to meet and help me soon.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours sincerely, Kidist

AI examiner evaluation

Task Achievement / Task Response: Band 5.5

You address the main purpose and include relevant information about your degree, previous roles, the support you want, and a meeting. The requests for help with the organisation’s website and customer service are specific and appropriate. However, the study and work history is compressed into one sentence, and the help you seek is not fully explained—for example, you could say what you need to learn about the website or customer interactions. The meeting request, “arrange time to meet,” is also vague: suggest a day, time, or place and invite your mentor to propose an alternative. These details would make the letter’s purpose more fully developed.

Coherence and Cohesion: Band 6.0

The letter follows a generally sensible order: introduction, background, requests for guidance, and a closing. This makes the overall message easy to follow. Some links between ideas are less smooth, however. “Although” begins a sentence without a matching main clause, while “So” and “Moreover” make the requests feel somewhat mechanically connected. The background and support requests are also crowded into one paragraph, so the reader has to move quickly between topics. Use separate paragraphs for your experience, the guidance you hope to receive, and the meeting arrangements, and connect ideas more naturally to create clearer progression.

Lexical Resource: Band 5.5

You use enough vocabulary to communicate the main points, including relevant workplace terms such as “cashier,” “data analyst,” and “customer service.” The requests are understandable, but several word choices or combinations are unnatural or imprecise, such as “manipulate” for using a website and “make it clear about the customer service.” There are also spelling and form errors, including “collegues” and “inorder,” which reduce accuracy. Aim for more natural professional expressions and check spelling carefully. For example, describe learning how to “navigate” the website and ask for guidance on “handling customer enquiries.”

Grammatical Range and Accuracy: Band 5.5

You attempt both simple and more complex sentences, including the sentence beginning “Although” and the conditional request “if you could show me.” However, some sentence structures are faulty or incomplete: “Although, now it will be a new working environment with new position to work at” does not form a complete, well-connected sentence, and “I would appreciate if” is missing “it.” There are also errors in tense and articles, such as “I was hired on last friday” and “as a cashier,” as well as inconsistent punctuation and spacing. Use complete clauses and review articles and verb forms; these changes would make your meaning more consistently clear.

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

Browse more IELTS Writing model answers or get your own writing scored by the same AI examiner.