Twenty minutes, 150 words, one third of the mark

Writing has two tasks in sixty minutes. Task 1 is worth one third of your Writing score and Task 2 is worth two thirds — so Task 1 gets twenty minutes and Task 2 gets forty. Candidates who spend thirty minutes perfecting Task 1 are taking time from the task worth double.

Academic Task 1 gives you data — a line graph, bar chart, pie chart, table, map, or a process diagram — and asks you to *summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant*. Minimum 150 words.

General Training Task 1 is a letter, not a chart — formal, semi-formal or personal. This course covers the Academic version; if you are sitting General Training, the timing and word count are the same but the task is different.

The instruction contains the whole exam. *Select* means you must leave things out. *Main features* means the big movements, not every number. *Make comparisons* means the marks are in the relationships between figures, not in the figures themselves.

And there is one thing the instruction does not say: explain why. Task 1 never asks for causes, and inventing them is the single most common error. A graph showing car ownership rising is not evidence that incomes rose, or that public transport declined — those are guesses, and a guess is not a description. It also costs you under Task Achievement, because you spent words on something the task did not want.

Write at least 150 words. Under-length is penalised directly. Aim for 160 to 190 — enough to be safely over, not so much that Task 2 suffers. There is no upper limit, but long Task 1 answers usually mean the candidate is padding or explaining causes.