Everything about CELPIP writing task 1, the email task, plus 5 formal email practice questions with model sample answers. Learn the 27 minute timing, the 150 to 200 word range, the three-bullet rule and the register that raters reward.
Five Task 1 scenarios, from an easy billing dispute to a hard civic letter. Write your answer with no timer, then reveal the model sample and the explanation.
Your suitcase never arrived in Winnipeg. The airline opened a file and promised delivery within 24 hours. Five days later there has been no bag, no call and no update, and you have replaced clothing and medication at your own expense.
Teaches: firm tone without rudeness, invented specifics, a countable ask with a deadline.
Practise this questionA bylaw leaves snow clearing to each homeowner, but several properties on your block are vacant or owned by absentee landlords. By mid-winter the sidewalk is impassable, and your neighbour with a walker has stopped going outside.
Teaches: establishing standing, diagnosing rather than complaining, offering a fallback.
Practise this questionA mandatory night shift until the end of February has made your Tuesday evening accounting class impossible, and the college refund deadline has already passed. You want the tuition moved to the winter term, not refunded.
Teaches: conceding the rule before asking, offering evidence unprompted, precise identifiers.
Practise this questionYou cancelled in person at the end of May and were told nothing further was needed. The club has taken the monthly fee twice since. Two phone calls, two promised manager callbacks, and nobody has contacted you.
Teaches: the ledger paragraph, parallel structure, admitting your one weakness first.
Practise this questionResidents chain bicycles to the railings in a garage shared with visitor parking, and two were cut loose and stolen last month. An empty storage room sits beside the entrance. Propose converting it into a secure bike room.
Teaches: problem before proposal, costing your idea, asking for the next step not the outcome.
Practise this questionFormal email, informal email and survey response, all in one place with model answers.
Back to the samples hub →CELPIP writing task 1 is called Writing an Email. You are shown a short situation, usually four or five sentences of realistic Canadian context, and underneath it three bullet instructions that tell you exactly what your email has to contain. You then write that email, about 150 to 200 words, in roughly 27 minutes, typed into an on-screen editor. Task 1 comes first in the writing section, before Task 2, and both are marked by trained CELPIP raters rather than by a machine.
The part that catches people out is that Task 1 has two faces. The task itself never changes, but the reader does, and the reader decides your register. If the scenario points you at a customer relations department, a city councillor, a college registrar or a condo board, you are writing a formal email, which is what this page covers. If it points you at a cousin, a friend or a teammate, you are writing an informal email, and the rules of the game shift completely.
A formal email on CELPIP is not the stiff, archaic thing many candidates imagine. Raters are not looking for "I am writing to hereby inform your good self". They are looking for the register a competent adult uses when writing to an organisation that has something they need: clear, polite, specific, and organised so the reader can act on it. The best mental model is that you are writing to a real person who has forty other emails in their inbox and will act on yours only if it is easy to act on.
That is why the five samples on this page are all built around a request. A delayed suitcase, an uncleared sidewalk, a course deferral, a mistaken charge and a proposal to a condo board. In every case the email exists because the writer wants something to happen, and every sentence either establishes the facts, shows the impact, or names the action. Nothing is decoration. That is the shape of a high band Task 1 answer.
The 2026 CELPIP writing format at a glance, for the email task specifically.
Four criteria, four weights. Knowing which one is worth what tells you where to spend your 27 minutes.
Are your ideas developed, and do they follow each other in an order that makes sense? The biggest single slice, and the one that paragraphing protects.
Grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence control. How much work the reader has to do to understand you.
Did you cover all three bullets, in the right register, at the right length? The easiest quarter of your score to lose by accident.
Range and precision, not obscurity. The right plain word beats a thesaurus word used slightly wrong every time.
Read those weights again, because they contain a strategy. Content and Coherence plus Task Fulfilment is 55 percent of your Task 1 score, and both are structural. They are decided before you write a single elegant sentence, by whether you planned, whether you gave each bullet room, and whether your paragraphs are in a sensible order. Vocabulary, the thing most candidates worry about most, is the smallest slice at 20 percent.
The practical consequence is that three minutes of planning is worth more than any amount of vocabulary polish. Decide your purpose sentence, decide which paragraph handles which bullet, decide what you are asking for, and the two biggest criteria are largely secured. Then write plainly and spend the last three minutes on Readability, which is worth another 25 percent and is mostly a proofreading exercise.
Your final band is reported on the CLB 1 to 12 scale. Most permanent residence applicants are aiming at CLB 9 or higher, which in writing terms means an answer that covers every bullet, sustains a consistent register, develops each idea with specific detail, and contains few enough errors that the reader never has to reread a sentence.
Every one of the five sample answers on this page uses the same skeleton, and it is worth learning as a reflex, because a skeleton you do not have to think about frees your 27 minutes for the parts that actually need thought. Four paragraphs, roughly 40 to 50 words each, lands you inside the word range without counting.
One paragraph per bullet is not a stylistic preference, it is a scoring device. It makes coverage visible. A rater working through your email can point at paragraph three and tick bullet two, and Task Fulfilment is settled without them having to hunt. When candidates merge everything into one dense block, the content may all be present and the marks still evaporate, because nothing is findable.
The other half of the skeleton is the ask. Formal emails on CELPIP almost always want something, and vague wanting is the most common way a competent writer lands a mediocre band. Compare "I hope you can resolve this soon" with "I would appreciate confirmation of my suitcase's location by Friday, 10 October, along with delivery to my home address and reimbursement of my documented expenses." The second is three countable requests and a date. It reads as professional because it is actionable.
Register is where strong writers quietly lose Task Fulfilment marks. These are the phrases that hold the line, and the habits that break it.
The useful test is whether a busy stranger with authority over your problem would find the email easy to act on. That single question sorts most register decisions on its own. It rules out the anger, because anger makes people defensive. It rules out the pleading, because pleading buries the ask. And it rules out the archaic formality, because nobody has time to decode it.
These are the specific ways good English still produces a mediocre band on the email task.
Almost always bullet 3, the one that says what you want to happen. Candidates describe the problem beautifully for three paragraphs and then stop. Task Fulfilment is 25 percent, and this is how most of it gets lost.
If the situation mentions a reference number, a refund deadline or a staff member's name, that is not scenery. It is material, and leaving it out is a visible sign that you did not read carefully.
Fair complaints still lose marks when the register drops. The frustration should sit in the facts (five days, no call, no update), never in the adjectives. A firm email outscores a furious one every time.
"Please resolve this as soon as possible" is not a request, it is a mood. Name the actions, name the amount, name the date. Vagueness in the closing paragraph is what makes a competent email feel amateur.
The content is all there, the marks are not. Coherence is 30 percent of your score, and an unbroken block of 190 words makes a rater work to find each bullet. Paragraph breaks are free marks.
On letters to officials, boards and registrars, bullet 1 usually asks who you are. An email from an unidentified resident or student has no weight and no file to attach it to. Name, address or student number, first paragraph.
Purpose sentence, one line per bullet, and the ask. Three minutes of notes protects 55 percent of your score, which is what Content and Coherence plus Task Fulfilment are worth together.
Flight AC 264, reference YWG10327, $340 in replacements. None of it is real and none of it needs to be. Make it up, then keep it straight for 200 words.
"By Friday, 10 October" instead of "soon". It is the single cheapest way to make a request sound professional, and it takes four extra words.
Acknowledging the rule you are asking around ("I understand the deadline has passed") proves you read the situation and makes the real request far easier to grant.
Ask the condo board to add an item to the agenda, not to build the bike room. Requesting the next step rather than the whole outcome is genuinely persuasive and reads as sophisticated.
Readability is 25 percent and it is mostly verb tenses, plurals and punctuation. Reading your last paragraph twice is worth more than any extra sentence you could have written.
CELPIP Writing Task 1 is Writing an Email. You are given a short situation and three bullet instructions, and you write an email of about 150 to 200 words in roughly 27 minutes. The register is decided by the scenario: writing to a company, an official or an institution calls for a formal email, while writing to a friend or a relative calls for an informal one.
About 27 minutes. A sensible split is 3 to 4 minutes planning, roughly 20 minutes writing, and the last 3 minutes proofreading. In the 2026 computer-delivered format the clock is on screen, and Task 1 comes before Task 2.
About 150 to 200 words. Below 150 you almost certainly have not developed all three bullets, and much above 200 you are spending time that should go into proofreading. Four short paragraphs of roughly 40 to 50 words each lands neatly inside the range.
Yes. All three bullets must be covered, and Task Fulfilment is 25 percent of your writing score. Missing a bullet, or answering it in a single vague clause, caps your band no matter how good the grammar is. Giving each bullet its own paragraph is the simplest way to make coverage obvious to a rater.
Look at the reader named in the prompt. A customer relations department, a city councillor, a registrar, a condo board or a manager you do not know means formal. A cousin, a friend, a teammate or a sibling means informal. The scenario always tells you, and choosing the wrong register is the single most expensive mistake on Task 1.
Raters score your email 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 as a band on the CLB 1 to 12 scale.
Yes, and you should. Flight numbers, reference codes, dates, dollar amounts and names are all fair game and cost nothing to invent. Raters reward development, and concrete detail is what development looks like. The only rule is that your invented details must stay consistent with the scenario you were given.
Use a formal greeting, then a one-sentence opening that states your purpose, then one paragraph per bullet, then a closing line and a sign-off. Four short paragraphs is the reliable shape. Purpose first means the reader knows the subject before reading anything else, which is exactly what coherence rewards.
Yes. All 5 formal email questions, their model sample answers and the full explanations are free, with no account and no credit card required.
Yes. Every scenario and sample answer follows the 2026 CELPIP format: a situation plus three bullets, 150 to 200 words, roughly 27 minutes, scored on the CLB 1 to 12 scale.
Task 1 has a second face, Task 2 is a different task entirely, and the timed tests are where you prove all of it.
The other half of Task 1. Same three bullets, completely different register.
See 5 samples →Responding to survey questions. Two options, one choice, no greeting.
See 5 samples →Both tasks under the real 27 and 26 minute limits, with expert feedback.
Start a writing test →Full-length CELPIP mock tests across all four skills in one place.
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