We got a fantastic question about Task 1 strategies.
The advice today is for the general training letter, but the ideas today will help academic students as well.
Here’s the question:
Hi Jessica. Can I use this closure in the letter? Are all four sentences necessary? Should I have a line break between each of them?
If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me at xxx@ymail.com. Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanking you kindly.
Yours faithfully,
XXX
Including all these statements is redundant.
We don’t need all four of those statements, even in real-life letters or emails.
Using the first sentence, “If you require any further information…,” is usually enough, and an acceptable way to close a formal letter.
The next phrase, “Looking forward to…”, is a bit too informal for this letter type.
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Now, looking at this strategically for your score, these closings do not raise your Task Achievement score.
The openings and closings are not directly connected to the bullet points in the question, so they don’t matter for the TA marks.
You should be spending most of the 20 minutes addressing the bullet points, in the body of the letter.
Really, one sentence opening and one sentence closing is enough.
The statement “Thank you…” is also not striking the right formal tone.
As to the sign off, “Yours faithfully,”, it doesn’t really matter. The examiner barely looks at that. Just don’t say “Love,” in a formal letter.
Nevertheless, if you can address each bullet point, in detail, and you have extra time, sure, you can include more than one sentence in the opening or closing.
If you have time, you can certainly throw in some impressive, extra vocabulary and sentence structures to help those scores.
You could add, for instance:
- I look forward to hearing from you soon.
- I hope to hear from you soon.
- Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or comments.
- If you have any further queries about the information presented/project proposed, please do not hesitate to reach out via social media or this email address.
What IELTS queries do you have?
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