CELPIP Writing tips: Practice Test 6

Most writing tips are true and useless, because they are handed over without a prompt to apply them to. Every tip below is attached to one of the two questions this test actually asks, and several of them would be the wrong advice on a different prompt.

Task 1: the email asking Priya to cover your shift

You and your co-worker Priya cover the same weekend shifts at a busy garden centre. Your sister's wedding falls on a Saturday you are scheduled to work, and Priya is the only trained member of staff who could take the shift. She covered a shift for you once before and you have not returned the favour. The bullets ask you to request the cover and give the exact date and hours, explain what the shift involves and anything unusual she should be ready for, and acknowledge that you owe her a favour and suggest how you will pay it back.

A co-worker sits in the trickiest register band on the whole test. Priya is not a friend and not your manager, so the email has to be warm without sliding into text-message English, and considerate about the imposition without turning into a formal request. That balance is the thing that separates a CLB 7 answer from a CLB 9 one, and it is the reason this prompt is worth practising twice.

Tips for the co-worker email

• Fix the date, the hours and the repayment before you type. Two or three minutes choosing them is cheaper than inventing them mid-sentence and then contradicting yourself.
• Name a real Saturday and real hours. A dated shift with a start and an end scores where next weekend does not.
• Put the ask in the first two lines. Priya needs to know what she is being asked before she is told why, and the third bullet needs the room.
• Make the second bullet procedural. What the shift involves, then the unusual thing she should be ready for, in the order she would actually meet them.
• Repay in kind and in specifics. A named shift you will take back covers the third bullet. Anything that reads as a thank you does not.

Task 2: the Neighbourhood Grant Survey

Your neighbourhood association has won a $75,000 grant to build one new feature on an empty lot near the elementary school. Option A is a community garden: forty raised plots rented to residents at $30 a season, a shared tool shed and a water line, used mainly from May to September and dependent on a volunteer committee to run the waiting list. Option B is a covered outdoor rink: skating and hockey in winter and basketball in summer, free and open to everyone all year, noisy in the evenings and about $18,000 a year to light and maintain.

Tips for the survey response

• Choose in the first sentence. Name the garden or the rink and never revisit the decision. Switching sides is the fastest way to lose Task Fulfilment marks in this task.
• Argue with the numbers you were given. Forty plots at $30 a season, or $18,000 a year set against free access in every month of the year.
• Answer your own weak point. The garden closes in October and the rink is loud at night. Meeting the objection to your own choice is a high-band move.
• Write no greeting and no sign-off. A survey response has no recipient, so a salutation spends words of a 200-word budget on nobody.
• Keep a minute at the end. Verb tenses and plurals are where otherwise fluent writers give away Readability marks.

The tip that applies to both tasks

Treat the word count as a budget rather than a target. Two hundred words is roughly 55 for each bullet in Task 1 and two developed reasons in Task 2, so anything spent on a wind-up is taken straight out of somewhere the marking is actually looking. Write the first sentence as the point, and there is room for everything that has to follow it.