Fifteen CELPIP writing practice questions with a model sample answer for every one. Write your own answer with no timer, then reveal the sample and a full explanation of the structure, the phrases and the mistakes it avoids. Free, and built for the 2026 format.
Every question below opens with no timer. Draft your answer, then reveal the model sample and the explanation. Grouped by question type and graded by difficulty.
Emails to a business, an institution or an official. Register stays respectful throughout.
Your suitcase never arrived in Winnipeg. The airline opened a file and promised delivery within 24 hours. Five days later, nothing. Write to customer relations with the facts, the costs and a deadline.
Practise this questionA bylaw leaves snow clearing to each homeowner, but several houses on your block are empty. By January the sidewalk is impassable. Write to your city councillor and propose a fix.
Practise this questionA mandatory night shift has made your Tuesday evening accounting class impossible, and the refund deadline has passed. Ask the registrar to move your tuition to the winter term instead.
Practise this questionYou cancelled in person in May, but the club has taken the monthly fee twice since. Two phone calls, two promised callbacks, no reply. Ask for the charges to stop and the money back.
Practise this questionTwo bicycles were cut loose and stolen in the shared garage. An empty storage room sits beside the entrance. Write a proposal to the condo board with a costing and one small next step.
Practise this questionEmails to a friend or family member. Contractions and short sentences are expected, but all three bullets still have to land.
You are moving across town and a rental van costs more than you have. Your cousin owns a pickup. Ask for it, name the exact hours you need it, and offer something real in return.
Practise this questionYour friend booked the permits in February and bought the food. Two weeks out, your doctor bans paddling for six weeks. Break the news, settle the money, and offer a way to make it up.
Practise this questionYou have booked the back room of a restaurant for your partner's fortieth. Invite a friend who lives two hours away, keep the secret airtight, and remove the obstacle stopping them coming.
Practise this questionA former coworker walked your resume to the hiring manager and wrote your reference. You got the job. Tell her, thank her properly, and suggest a specific way to celebrate.
Practise this questionYou are the team's only goalie and work is sending you to Calgary for six weeks. The league fines a short bench. Tell Dev which games you miss, and arrive with the problem already solved.
Practise this questionTwo options, one choice, developed reasons. This is CELPIP writing task 2, and it is not an email.
A parent council has raised $30,000. Option A buys new playground equipment for every student. Option B funds after-school tutoring for the students who are falling behind. Choose one.
Practise this questionYour employer has $1,200 per employee to spend. Option A is a two-day team retreat. Option B is an individual budget for courses and conferences. Pick one and defend it.
Practise this questionA sound but shabby 1911 warehouse sits empty downtown. Option A restores it as a heritage museum. Option B demolishes it for forty affordable apartments. The council wants your view.
Practise this questionThe market runs outdoors from May to October. Option A keeps it that way with more space and live music. Option B moves it into the vacant curling rink for all fifty-two Saturdays.
Practise this questionA business association has $10,000 for graduating students. Option A is one major scholarship for the top student. Option B is twenty $500 bursaries based on financial need.
Practise this questionMost people preparing for CELPIP Writing already know roughly what to say. What they do not know is what a strong answer is supposed to look like on the screen: how long the paragraphs are, how the first sentence works, how much invented detail is normal, and where the marks actually come from. That is the gap a good CELPIP writing sample closes. Reading one strong answer with the reasoning made explicit teaches you more than writing five answers into a vacuum.
This page collects 15 CELPIP writing practice questions covering all three question types you can meet in the writing section of the 2026 format. Five are formal emails and five are informal emails, which together make up Writing Task 1. Five are survey responses, which is Writing Task 2. Every question gives you a realistic Canadian scenario, the exact prompt wording, and either the three bullet instructions (for the email tasks) or the two survey options (for Task 2).
Each question then carries a model sample answer written inside the 150 to 200 word range, followed by an explanation broken into four parts: how the answer is structured paragraph by paragraph, the key phrases worth reusing, why the answer works in rater terms, and the common mistakes it deliberately avoids. The point is never to memorise the sample. It is to see the method clearly enough that you can run the same method on a scenario you have never seen.
This is a learn-by-example mode, so there is no timer and no evaluation of your answer. You write, you reveal, you compare. When you want a real test with expert feedback and a CLB band, the timed CELPIP writing tests do that instead, and the full mock tests put writing back alongside the other three skills.
Task 1 can arrive in a formal or an informal register, and the register is chosen for you by the scenario. Task 2 is a different animal entirely. Pick a type to drill it on its own.
Write a polite, clearly organised email to someone you do not know personally: a company, an official, a registrar, a board. Five samples covering complaints, requests and proposals.
See 5 formal email samples →Write a warm, natural email to a friend, a cousin or a teammate that still covers all three bullets. Five samples covering favours, bad news, invitations and thanks.
See 5 informal email samples →Pick one of two survey options and defend it with developed reasons and a concrete example. No greeting, no signature. Five samples on money, heritage, schools and community.
See 5 survey response samples →Reading works differently from writing: nothing is written and nothing is judged, so instead of a model answer you get the reasoning. Each module explains how its part is built, shows a worked example where every option is taken apart, and finishes with untimed questions that hide their explanation behind a button. All passages are original, and all four parts follow the 2026 format.
A personal message, then a reply with five blanks in it. The one part with an order rule, and the one where the wrong options are almost all true.
Learn Part 1 →Four options compared, and an email applying them to one person. The tightest clock in the section, and the answers live in the diagram rather than the email.
Learn Part 2 →Nine statements matched to paragraphs A to D, plus option E for a fact that is not there at all. No order to ride, and no keywords to lean on.
Learn Part 3 →A website article where named people disagree, then a reader's comment. Understanding it is not enough: the distractors swap who said what.
Learn Part 4 →Listening works like reading here: nothing is written and nothing is judged. Each module explains how its part is built, then hands you two real clips that open in a player with no timer. You listen, answer, and reveal the full transcript and the reasoning for every option. Twelve worked examples across the six parts, all original and built for the 2026 format. The accents are North American, and the scripts are Canadian.
Two strangers, one helping the other out of a jam, with a catch hidden inside every fix. A dead e-bike on a trail, and a bus route to Butchart Gardens.
Learn Part 1 →Two people who already know each other, where the feeling sits under the plan. A ride while the car is in the shop, and making saskatoon berry jam.
Learn Part 2 →One speaker holds the prices and dates the other needs, and so do the wrong options. Renting a community garden plot, and a theatre season subscription.
Learn Part 3 →A single reader, facts in order, and the questions switch to sentences you complete. A skating oval opening for the winter, and a record lake cleanup.
Learn Part 4 →Three neighbours who disagree, tracked by where they sit, with questions about who sided with whom. Who floods the rink, and how to spend a small grant.
Learn Part 5 →One prepared talk, hard vocabulary, and a stance you have to infer from the argument. Whether a polytechnic chases university status, and a county's gravel.
Learn Part 6 →Speaking works differently again: you record yourself, purely so that you can hear yourself. The audio stays in your browser, it is never uploaded and it is never scored. Then you reveal a spoken model answer with its structure, key phrases and common mistakes. Each task has its own page and 5 questions, 40 in total, with real pictures on the four tasks that show one, and the official prep and speaking times are shown as information only. There is no timer here.
Somebody else's problem, and a relationship that sets your tone before you say a word.
Learn Task 1 →One story, told properly, and a reflection at the end that most answers never reach.
Learn Task 2 →Describe a busy room to somebody who cannot see it. Actions, not objects.
Learn Task 3 →The same scene, the opposite job. Re-describing it is the commonest way to lose marks.
Learn Task 4 →Three screens. The option you rejected vanishes and a third one appears.
Learn Task 5 →Two people you could speak to, and you must choose exactly one. Scored on tone.
Learn Task 6 →Ninety seconds of argument with nobody to persuade and nothing on screen.
Learn Task 7 →A thing with no name, down a phone line, ending in a request people forget to make.
Learn Task 8 →Every sample answer on this page is written to the official 2026 CELPIP writing format, so the length, the structure and the register are all things you can reproduce on test day.
The two modes on this site do genuinely different jobs, and using the wrong one at the wrong stage of your preparation wastes weeks. The practice course you are reading about is for the learning phase. It gives you one question type at a time, no clock, and a model answer waiting behind a button. You can spend forty minutes on a 200 word email if that is what it takes to get the register right, because nothing is being measured.
The timed writing tests are for the rehearsal phase. They give you both tasks back to back under the real 27 and 26 minute limits, in the same kind of on-screen editor the computer-delivered test uses, and they return expert feedback and a CLB band. That is where you find out whether the method you learned here survives contact with a clock.
The honest sequence is: read samples until the structure feels obvious, drill each question type here until you can produce it without thinking, then move to timed tests and finally to full mock tests where writing sits alongside reading, listening and speaking in one sitting. People who skip straight to timed tests usually plateau, because a timer teaches you speed, not technique.
Reading a model answer and nodding at it changes nothing. These five habits are what turn a sample into a score.
The temptation is to peek. Do not. Your own attempt is what makes the sample legible, because you only notice the choices the model writer made where they differ from yours. A sample read cold teaches you almost nothing.
Purpose in sentence one, one paragraph per bullet, a specific request at the end. That skeleton transfers to any scenario. The tomatoes, the hockey fine and the $54.99 do not. Memorised content collapses the moment the prompt shifts.
Every strong sample here is full of made-up specifics: a flight number, a dollar figure, a calendar date, a named neighbour. They cost nothing to invent and they are the fastest way to lift an answer above a vague one. Raters reward development, and detail is development.
Task Fulfilment is a quarter of your score, and it is the easiest quarter to lose. After you write, go back to the three bullets and point at the sentence that covers each one. If you cannot point at it, the rater cannot find it either.
Every sample on this site is followed by a breakdown of the structure, the reusable phrases, the reasons it works and the mistakes it dodges. That commentary is the actual teaching material. The sample answer is only the evidence. If you read one thing per question, read the common mistakes list, because those are the specific ways strong writers still lose marks on CELPIP writing.
CELPIP writing samples are model answers written to the standard of a strong CLB band, based on real CELPIP writing questions. A useful sample shows you the structure, the register and the level of detail expected in 150 to 200 words. Every sample on this page comes with an explanation of the structure, the key phrases and the mistakes it avoids, so you can copy the method rather than the content.
There are 15 CELPIP writing practice questions: 5 formal emails and 5 informal emails for Writing Task 1, and 5 survey responses for Writing Task 2. Each one includes the scenario, the prompt, the bullet instructions or the two survey options, a model sample answer and a full explanation.
The practice course drills one question type at a time with no timer. You write an answer, then reveal a model sample answer and an explanation of why it works. There is no evaluation in this mode. The timed writing tests at /writing/ run both tasks under real 27 and 26 minute limits and return expert feedback with a CLB band.
Task 1 is Writing an Email. You read a situation, then write an email of about 150 to 200 words in roughly 27 minutes. Three bullet instructions tell you what the email must contain, and all three must be covered. The reader may be a stranger, which calls for a formal register, or someone you know well, which calls for an informal one.
Task 2 is Responding to Survey Questions. You read a short survey with two options, choose one, and justify your choice with developed reasons in about 150 to 200 words, in roughly 26 minutes. It is not an email, so it takes no greeting and no signature.
CELPIP raters score both writing tasks on four criteria: Content and Coherence at 30 percent, Vocabulary at 20 percent, Readability at 25 percent and Task Fulfilment at 25 percent. The result is reported on the Canadian Language Benchmarks scale from CLB 1 to CLB 12.
Aim for 150 to 200 words on each task. Under 150 words rarely leaves room to develop every bullet or every reason, and going well over 200 words costs you proofreading time without adding marks. Every sample answer on this page sits inside the range.
No, and you should not try. Memorised answers rarely fit the scenario you are given, and raters notice when a paragraph has been dropped in. Copy the structure instead: state the purpose in the first sentence, give one paragraph per bullet, use concrete invented details, and close with a specific request.
Yes. Every question and sample answer on this page reflects the 2026 CELPIP format: two writing tasks, 150 to 200 words each, roughly 27 minutes for the email and 26 minutes for the survey response, scored on the CLB 1 to 12 scale.
Yes. All 15 CELPIP writing practice questions, all 15 model sample answers and all the explanations are free. No account and no credit card is needed to open any of them.
Samples teach technique. Timed tests prove it. Full mocks put it back in context with the other three skills.
Both tasks under real timing, with expert feedback and a CLB band.
Start a writing test →Correspondence, diagrams, information and viewpoints across 4 parts.
Start reading →Record all 8 speaking tasks on screen with real prep and response timers.
Start speaking →Full-length CELPIP mock tests across all four skills in one place.
View mock tests →Pick a question type, write your answer with no timer, then reveal the model sample and the explanation. All 15 are free.
