Writing

About 23 minutes, about 12 items, across three kinds of task: Build a Sentence, Write an Email and Write for an Academic Discussion.

• You type everything. There is no handwriting anywhere in the test.
• Twenty-three minutes is short, so there is no time for a long plan — but there is always time for a thirty-second one, and it is the best thirty seconds you will spend.
• ⚠ The old Integrated Writing task, where you read a passage, heard a lecture and wrote about both, is gone from the 2026 test. If a practice book teaches it, the book is out of date.

You assemble or complete a sentence so that it is grammatically correct.

• Accuracy is the whole point. Nothing is being measured except whether the sentence is right.
• The traps are the ones Chinese candidates already know: articles 冠词 (a / the / nothing), agreement 主谓一致 (the data show, each student has), tense 时态 across a sentence, and the preposition 介词 that a particular verb takes (depend on, consist of, result in).
• Word order in English is fixed in ways Chinese is not: subject, verb, object; adverbs of frequency before the main verb; adjectives before the noun in a set order.
• Read your finished sentence once, slowly. Most errors here are visible on a second look and invisible on the first.

A short email that does a job: reply to a message, make a request, explain a problem, decline politely.

• Start by deciding who you are writing to and what you want to happen. Everything else follows from those two answers.
• Register 语域 is graded here. To a tutor or an office you are polite and slightly indirect: I was wondering whether, would it be possible to, I would be grateful if. To a classmate you are direct and warm.
• A good short email has four moves: why you are writing, the detail, what you are asking for, a close. Four sentences can carry all four.
• ⚠ Do not open with Dear Sir or Madam when the prompt names the person, and do not sign off Yours faithfully in a message to a classmate. Getting the register wrong is more visible than a grammar slip, because it is wrong in every sentence at once.
• Answer everything the prompt asks. An email that is beautifully written and leaves out one of two requests has failed at the job the task set.

You are shown a professor's question and two students' replies, and you add your own contribution to the discussion.

• This is the task that most resembles real university work, and it is scored on whether you can join a conversation, not on whether you can write an essay.
• A contribution that scores well usually does four things:
  1. States a position clearly, in one sentence.
  2. Gives a reason for it.
  3. Supports the reason with an example, a consequence or a piece of evidence 证据.
  4. Engages with a classmate — agreeing and extending, or disagreeing and saying why.
• That fourth move is what separates a good answer from an average one, and it is the one Chinese candidates leave out most often. I agree with Mei that... but I would add that... is worth more than another paragraph of your own opinion.
• Length: one solid paragraph. You have minutes, not an hour. Write fewer sentences and make each one carry weight.
• ⚠ Do not restate the professor's question before you start. It costs you a quarter of your time and earns nothing: the reader already knows what was asked.

Across the writing tasks, four things are judged, and they are the same four that any English marker looks at:

• A memorised phrase is a risk, not a shortcut. With the development of society and every coin has two sides appear in thousands of scripts and add nothing; a marker reads straight past them and the words you spent on them are gone.
• Precision beats decoration. Cost fell sharply after 2015 says more, and scores better, than there was a considerable diminution in the pecuniary outlay.
• A short correct sentence outranks a long broken one. Complexity only earns marks when it is accurate.

• Type in English every day, not just in practice tests. Typing speed is part of this section whether you like it or not.
• Plan for thirty seconds before the Academic Discussion task: position, reason, example, whose comment you will answer. Then write straight through.
• Leave sixty seconds to read your answer back. Look for articles, plurals and verb endings — those three account for most of the errors a Chinese candidate makes and can fix.
• Practise writing to a person: a tutor, an office, a classmate. An email with no sense of its reader is the commonest weak answer in this section.
• Format facts in this section were checked on the ETS website on 13 September 2026: TOEFL iBT content and structure.