CELPIP Writing Task 1 Template: Writing an Email

Task 1 gives you 27 minutes to write one email of 150 to 200 words. The prompt describes an everyday situation, names the person you are writing to, and asks you to do around three things. Prometric, which owns and administers CELPIP, publishes the task, the timing, and the word range on its official test format page at celpip.ca, and lists the on-screen timer, word counter, and spell check among the test's built-in tools.

That last row is where people lose marks they never see. The spelling checker underlines a misspelled word and offers you a short dropdown of alternatives, but it will not fix anything by itself, so a flagged word you never click stays wrong on submission. It also checks spelling only. Write "effect" when you meant "affect", or "quiet" when you meant "quite", and the screen stays clean while a rater reads a word-choice error. A real word in the wrong place never gets an underline. Budget the last five minutes to click every underlined word, then read the whole email once more for the grammar the software cannot see.

The word range is a guideline, not a hard cutoff. Paragon says you have a little room to go under or over the suggested limit, and that your score may suffer if you land significantly outside it. Treat "significantly" as the operative word. Aim for 175 to 200 words when time allows, and you will never have to think about the range again. Ignore the specific buffer figures that circulate on prep blogs, because Paragon does not publish one.

Task 1 is one half of the Writing section. Task 2, the survey response, follows it with its own clock. If you want the whole section mapped out, see the full Writing section format, and when you are ready to work against real prompts, the CELPIP Writing practice test hub holds the full bank.

Your email is rated on four dimensions, each scored against performance-level descriptors: Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Readability, and Task Fulfillment. Trained raters score it against the published performance descriptors, and there is no raw score out of 38 for Writing, whatever you may have read elsewhere.

Here is what each dimension is actually looking at, and what you do about it.

For the full breakdown of the rating scale, see how CELPIP Writing is scored. To see what each Writing level means for your immigration file, the CELPIP Writing score chart and CLB equivalency maps every level to a Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB).

Decide who you are writing to before you type a single word, because that one decision fixes your tone and your sign-off. Read the prompt twice and ask whether this person knows you, and whether the relationship is professional or personal.

The Rule of Pairs

In formal writing, your opening salutation must match your closing sign-off. Mismatching them is a Readability error that costs you nothing to avoid.

Skip the To, From and Subject lines unless the prompt specifically asks for them. Plenty of prep sites tell you to invent a subject line. The task gives you a response box, not an email client, so start at the greeting and spend those words on the three bullets instead.

State who you are and why you are writing, in two sentences. The rater should know your purpose before the end of your second line.

Give the background. Set the scene so the reader understands the context before you complain or ask for anything.

Explain the specific issues, hazards, or details. This paragraph is the substance of the email, so give it your best sentence work.

Give the solution, request, or suggestion the prompt asks for. Be specific enough that the reader could act on it tomorrow.

Close with one forward-looking sentence, then your sign-off and your full name. A missing name or sign-off is a formatting error that a rater cannot ignore.

The closing sentence is the last thing the rater reads, so make it about this email. Say your purpose again in different words and attach it to something specific: the action you want, a date, or how you can be reached. A sentence that would fit any email ever written ("I look forward to hearing from you soon") tells the rater nothing about your prompt, and a stock line pasted from memory is exactly the kind of content CELPIP's test taker agreement rules out. The policy wording is on our page about memorised templates and CELPIP test integrity.

Before and after: the same closing, made specific

Each "after" answers at least two of the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) from the prompt. That is the whole trick.

A high-scoring Task 1 email runs 175 to 200 words across four short paragraphs, opens with your purpose, gives one paragraph per bullet point, and closes with a clear request. Here is the full template assembled into a single answer, with each move labelled so you can see the skeleton underneath.

The template above works on every Task 1 prompt, but it looks different depending on who you are writing to. These three samples run it through three different registers: a formal request to someone you know by name, a formal complaint to a stranger, and a semi-formal note to a neighbour. Each one names its word count, because knowing what 175 words feels like is half the battle.

The difference between Level 7 and Level 10 is rarely the idea. It is the detail, the control and the tone. Below is one Task 1 prompt answered three times, as our examples of a Level 7, a Level 9 and a Level 10 email. Under each one you'll see why it sits at that level, measured against the four things Prometric rates: Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Readability and Task Fulfillment.

These are our own practice answers, written to match Prometric's published Writing level descriptors (May 2026) and compared with the rated sample responses (Levels 7, 9 and 12) in its Writing Pro: Target 9+ Study Pack. They are not official CELPIP responses, and no CELPIP rater scored them. Only the real test gives you a real level. CELPIP levels match CLB levels one to one, so a Level 9 here means CLB 9.

Task 1 prompts recycle a small set of everyday Canadian situations, and complaints and requests make up the largest share of them. You will not see the exact prompt you practised, but you will almost certainly see one of these categories.

Practise one email in each category and you have covered the ground. What actually changes between them is your opening line and your closing line, which is what the next section handles. For a minute-by-minute plan of how to spend the 27 minutes, see the Task 1 timing strategy.

Match your opening and closing sentence to the category of the prompt, and the rest of the template stays identical. This table is the only part of the template that changes from email to email. Learn the six opening lines until they come without thinking, but treat the closing column as frames: every bracket gets filled from the prompt, so no two closings you write are ever the same. Everything after the opening sentence has to be about your prompt.

As a skeleton, yes. As a script, no, and the reason is stronger than marks. Prometric states that memorised or copied content in a test response is subject to invalidation of the result, and every test taker signs a contract to produce spontaneous, original responses. The full policy, with the exact wording, is on our page about memorised templates and CELPIP test integrity. Short of that line, a fully memorised email will cost you marks rather than earn them. Raters are trained to spot rehearsed language, and the pattern is easy to see: the structure is flawless while the content stays generic and never touches the specifics of the prompt.

There is a second tell that is harder to fake your way past. A memorized email produces a strange mismatch, where the vocabulary reads at a high level because it was polished in advance, while the sentences that actually respond to the prompt are noticeably simpler. Raters read the two together, and the gap between them is the giveaway.

Use the template for the shape: the salutation pair, the three signpost phrases, the paragraph order, the closing formula. Then fill it with detail that could only have come from this prompt. Names, dates, dollar amounts, unit numbers, the specific consequence you experienced. In the four samples above, the skeleton never changes and the content is different every time. That is the standard to aim for.

The same logic applies to Task 2. If you want the survey response equivalent, the CELPIP Writing Task 2 template uses a matching structure for the opinion task.

You now have the template, four model answers, and the phrase bank. The only thing left is the part that actually moves a score, which is writing your own email under time pressure and finding out where it breaks.

Open the Task 1 question bank, start the timer, and submit your email for instant AI scoring on all four rating dimensions. If you would rather work through the task step by step first, the CELPIP Writing course builds it up from the salutation onward.