Proofreading in Three Minutes
The last three minutes of each task are worth more per second than any other part of the section, but only if you check in a fixed order rather than reading it through again.
Why a fixed order beats reading it again
Most candidates use their remaining minutes to read the whole response from the top, looking for anything wrong. That is the least productive method available, for two reasons.
The first is that you cannot look for everything at once. Reading for sense, grammar, spelling, coverage and register simultaneously means noticing none of them reliably, and it means you will read your own intended meaning rather than the words on the page.
The second is that a general read spends equal attention on cheap and expensive errors. Three minutes is enough for perhaps four targeted passes, and the order of those passes decides how many marks the time returns.
The order below is arranged by value. Task checks come first because Task Fulfilment is 25 per cent and its failures are the fastest to find and fix. Surface errors come last because they cost the least.
Pass one: the task checks, forty seconds
Point at each bullet in the prompt and find the sentence in your answer that answers it. Not a sentence that mentions the topic, a sentence that answers it with a specific. If you cannot point at one, you have found the most expensive problem on the page and you should fix it before anything else.
Then check the prompt's own nouns and numbers against yours. If the prompt says a glass cabinet and a box of kitchen items, your email must be about a glass cabinet and a box of kitchen items. Substituting a supplied fact caps Task Fulfilment at 8 and Content and Coherence at 9, and it is invisible unless you deliberately look for it.
On Task 2, read your first sentence and your last sentence together. Both must name the same option, and the option must match whatever you selected in the control. Drift is penalised heavily and this check takes five seconds.
Finally, glance at the greeting and the close as a pair. Hi Sam with Sincerely, Daniel Reyes is a register failure that is invisible in the middle of the response and obvious when the two lines are read together.
These four checks take about forty seconds between them because none of them involves reading the response. You are looking at four specific places: the bullets, the prompt's nouns, the first and last sentences, and the greeting and close. Everything else on the page can wait.
Pass two: verbs, forty seconds
Read only the verbs, skipping everything else. You are checking two things and nothing else.
Timeline. Does the sequence of tenses describe a consistent story. I called on Tuesday and I am waiting since then, so yesterday I try again has three problems in one sentence and a reader has to reconstruct the order. I called on Tuesday and have heard nothing since, so I tried again yesterday is the same content in a sequence that reads once.
Agreement. Does each verb match its subject, particularly where a long phrase sits between them. The box of kitchen items that were delivered on Friday were missing several pieces fails because the subject is box. These errors cluster in your longest sentences, which are exactly where a reader is already working hardest.
This pass catches the two error types most likely to reduce Readability, and reading only for verbs makes both visible in a way that reading for sense does not.
Pass three: sentence boundaries, thirty seconds
Look at full stops and commas only. Two specific targets.
Comma splices. A comma joining two complete sentences. I unpacked the boxes, the cabinet was cracked. Replace the comma with a full stop, or add and, but or so. This error makes the reader do your grouping for you, which is the sort of thing the criterion is built to notice.
Over-long sentences. Anything past about twenty-five words is a candidate. Do not repair it; split it. A long sentence you are unsure of is a liability in a criterion that rewards control, and splitting it costs nothing and often improves the rhythm.
While you are here, confirm that you have paragraphs at all. A 180-word block loses marks under paragraphing, which is named in Readability, and adding two blank lines is the cheapest fix available on the whole page.
Stop writing at minute twenty-four and start checking, whatever state the sentence is in. A finished response with three checked minutes beats a longer one carrying an uncaught tense error.
Pass four: surface, thirty seconds
Now, and only now, the things most candidates start with.
Capitals after every full stop, and at the start of proper nouns. A missing capital at the start of a sentence is the most visible small error there is.
Apostrophes. Its is possessive, it's is it is. In a formal email you should not be writing it's anyway, which removes the risk.
Your own known misspellings. Everyone has three or four. Accommodation, receive, separate, definitely, occurred. There is no spellchecker in the answer box, so whatever you habitually mistype will stand exactly as typed.
Word count, last. If you are under 150, add a specific detail to your thinnest bullet. If you are over 210, cut a repeated point, not your example or your concession.
One thing not to do in this pass: do not upgrade vocabulary. Late substitutions are made without checking the collocation, and an advanced word used incorrectly scores worse than the plain word you replaced.
Making three minutes exist
The routine only works if the time is there, and the most common reason it is not is that composition ran to the buzzer.
Set an internal deadline at minute twenty-four of Task 1 and minute twenty-three of Task 2. At that point you stop writing, whatever state the last sentence is in. A finished response with three checked minutes scores better than a slightly longer one with none, because the unchecked version is carrying a tense error you would have caught.
If you find yourself at the deadline with a bullet unanswered, write one plain sentence answering it and then check. A short correct sentence covering a bullet is worth more than two polished ones covering something already covered.
Practise the routine as a separate exercise. Take an old answer of your own, set three minutes, and run the four passes in order. You will find things you did not find when you wrote it, and that gap is the whole argument for a fixed order.
One last habit. Keep a short list of what your own passes usually catch, and read it before you start checking. Most candidates find the same two or three errors in answer after answer, and knowing which ones they are turns a general search into a targeted one.
Never upgrade vocabulary in the final pass. Late substitutions are made without checking the collocation, and an advanced word used incorrectly scores lower than the plain word it replaced.
Practise it
Five questions on what to check, in what order, and what to leave alone.