CELPIP General Writing samples: Practice Test 4

CELPIP-General asks for two pieces of writing and no more, so a sample of the General writing section means one email and one survey response. Test 4 is a sample of each at the easy end of the range, and the two prompts set out below are the real ones the test serves rather than paraphrases of them.

Sample Task 1: the informal email to your cousin

Your cousin Dana lives in Winnipeg and has invited you to stay for a week in the spring. You have booked the flights, you land late at night, and you would rather spend more of the week seeing the city than the three days at the family cottage that Dana has planned. The bullets ask for your flight details including the arrival day and time along with a question about getting in from the airport, an explanation of what you would like to do differently and why, and a note of what you will bring or contribute during the stay.

The prompt is easy in vocabulary and hard in tact. You are asking a host to change a plan she made for you, which is a social move before it is a language one, and the sample answer that scores is the one that makes the request sound like enthusiasm for Winnipeg rather than a complaint about the cottage.

Sample Task 2: the School Trip Survey

A local elementary school can afford one kind of trip this year and is asking parents to vote. Option A is a single overnight science camp outside the city: three days, $180 a student, outdoor experiments, and two days of regular classes missed. Option B is four separate day trips, to a museum, a farm, an art gallery and a water treatment plant, at $45 a student in total, home every evening, with only half a day of classes missed each time.

What a strong sample answer does

• Opens with the fact the reader needs. In this email that is the arrival day and time, because everything Dana has to arrange depends on it.
• Gives the change a reason rather than an apology. One clear sentence about wanting to see the city does more than three about not wanting the cottage.
• Makes the contribution concrete. Naming what you will bring answers the third bullet. Saying you will help out does not.
• Chooses in the first line of the survey. Name the science camp or the four day trips, then argue with the money and the missed classes.
• Answers its own weakest point. If you pick the $180 camp, the cost is the obvious objection, so meet it instead of leaving the reader to raise it.

Worked samples with the reasoning attached

Three full sample answers are published on this site with the marking notes beside them: an informal email about visiting a new city, which is the closest published sample to this prompt, a formal email to a landlord about a repair for the other register, and a survey response for Task 2. They are written as structures to adapt, not scripts to memorise, and the CELPIP writing samples hub collects all three.

A sample of your own writing, marked

The most useful sample is the one built out of your own answer. When you submit, both tasks come back with a band on each criterion, your mistakes marked inside your own text, and a rewrite that keeps your content and lifts only the expression to a high band. Reading your paragraph beside its rewrite shows the gap in a way that somebody else's sample never can.