CELPIP Writing Task 1: The Official 150-200 Word Email Format (2026)

1What the official instructions actually say

CELPIP Writing has two tasks. The first is called Writing an Email, and its instructions have a fixed shape. In the official CELPIP-General Overview Study Pack published by Paragon, the sample Task 1 instruction reads: "Write an email to the chief librarian in about 150-200 words. Your email should do the following things:" — followed by a short list of things the email has to do.

Three things are worth noticing in that one sentence. It names the recipient ("the chief librarian"). It gives a length ("in about 150-200 words"). And it hands over a list — the bullets that follow are not suggestions, they are the specification your email is measured against. The official summary of Task 1 puts it plainly: you write an email about an everyday matter, and you will usually be asked to do around three things.

On test day the screen is split. The official study pack describes it this way: background information is on the left side, specific instructions are on the right side. You also get basic editing tools, spellcheck, and an automatic word count. The instructions stay visible the whole time — you are never writing from memory of the prompt.

What the instructions do not say is just as useful. They do not ask for a subject line. They do not specify how many paragraphs. They do not name a minimum or maximum sentence length, and they do not state a penalty for going over or under the range. Paragon publishes the range and the rubric; it does not publish a deduction table. Anything you have read that says "you lose one band per 20 words over" is somebody's guess, not an official rule.

One more official number: you have 27 minutes for Task 1 and 26 minutes for Task 2, inside a Writing section listed at 53 minutes total.

2Where 150-200 comes from, and where word count sits in the rubric

The range is not arbitrary. It is the amount of text a competent writer needs to open an email, do around three things with real detail, ask for something, and close — which is exactly what the task asks for. It is also short enough that four to six human raters can read every response.

CELPIP Writing is rated on four dimensions: Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Readability, and Task Fulfillment. Paragon lists the factors inside each one. Content/Coherence covers number of ideas, quality of ideas, organization of ideas, and examples and supporting details. Vocabulary covers word choice, suitable use of words and phrases, range, and precision. Readability covers format and paragraphing, connectors and transitions, grammar and sentence structure, and spelling and punctuation. Task Fulfillment covers relevance, completeness, tone, and word count.

Word count appears exactly once in that whole list — as the fourth factor under Task Fulfillment. It is one factor of sixteen, inside one dimension of four. That is the honest weight of the number, and it explains why length alone rarely decides a score.

It is worth knowing how the rating works, because it shapes what length can and cannot do for you. Each CELPIP writing performance is rated by four to six trained raters working independently. Each dimension is divided into five performance levels, and raters assign a level by matching tangible evidence in your response to the descriptors. The dimensional ratings are then transformed into a CELPIP level — the level you see on your report is derived from those ratings, not from a visible points total.

That CELPIP level maps one-to-one onto CLB for the levels immigration cares about: CELPIP 7 is CLB 7, CELPIP 9 is CLB 9, CELPIP 10 is CLB 10, and so on up to 12.

Tip: Treat 150-200 as a symptom, not a target. If your email naturally lands in the range, it usually means you did around three things with enough detail. If it lands far outside, something upstream went wrong — and that upstream thing is what the raters will actually see.

3What really happens if you write 120 words, or 260

Paragon does not publish a word-count penalty, so nobody can honestly tell you "120 words costs you exactly one level". What can be said accurately is what a length outside the range usually means, and which dimensions that meaning lands on.

At 120 words, the arithmetic is against you. The task asks you to do around three things. Take out a greeting, a purpose sentence, a closing line and a sign-off, and you have roughly 100 words of body left — around 33 words per task. That is enough to mention each thing and not enough to support any of them. Raters looking for "examples and supporting details" under Content/Coherence find assertions instead, and "completeness" under Task Fulfillment looks thin.

The real cost of a short email is almost never the number itself. It is the missing third task, or the body paragraph with no date, no name and no number in it. Fix the development and the number fixes itself.

At 260 words the risk changes shape. Length is not evidence of quality, and raters are reading for precision, not volume. Long responses tend to repeat an idea in two places, add a fourth point nobody asked for, and carry more surface errors simply because there are more sentences to make them in. Errors count under Readability, repetition counts under Vocabulary, and a response that drifts off the instructions counts under relevance.

There is a practical cost too. Every extra minute spent writing your sixth paragraph is a minute not spent on the three-minute proofread that the official study pack recommends — and proofreading is where cheap errors get removed.

A response at 145 or at 210 words is not in trouble. The instruction word is "about". Where you start to hear the number in the room is when the email is obviously half the task or nearly double it.

4Length vs development: two official samples at 156 and 197 words

The clearest evidence that length is not the score comes from Paragon's own published samples. In the official CELPIP Writing Pro study pack, two Task 1 responses to the same prompt are printed with their word counts and their levels.

The first is 156 words and was rated CELPIP Level 7. It sits inside the official range. The published analysis does not mention length at all: the weaknesses are that details are not precise, that more detail is needed for all three tasks, and that some grammar errors interfere with meaning.

The second is 197 words and was rated CELPIP Level 12. Also inside the range — 41 words longer. The published strengths are extremely specific and realistic details, vivid and precise language, and a tone described as ideal: friendly and polite.

So two responses, both compliant on word count, five levels apart. The distance between them is entirely in what the words are doing. The Level 12 response names the school, names the book, names the street, and describes a specific moment in the classroom. The Level 7 response says the children liked the novel.

This also tells you where to aim. If you are working toward CLB 9 or higher, the top half of the range — roughly 175 to 200 words — is where there is enough room to support three things properly. If you are consolidating at CLB 7, the lower half is perfectly safe as long as every task is genuinely addressed.

5The on-screen word counter — you never count by hand

A surprising number of test-takers spend exam minutes counting words on their fingers. They do not need to. The official study pack lists an automatic word count among the tools on the Writing screen, alongside basic editing tools and spellcheck.

The counter is a dashboard, not a scoreboard. Glance at it twice: once when you finish the second body paragraph, and once when you finish the sign-off. Two glances take four seconds and give you everything a running count would.

The first glance is the useful one. If you have finished your second body paragraph and the counter says 90, you have room to add a detail to each paragraph. If it says 190, you write a one-line close and stop. That is a decision you can only make while you still have time to act on it.

Spellcheck deserves a word too. It exists, so unflagged spelling mistakes are avoidable, and spelling sits under Readability. It will not catch the errors that matter most — "their" for "there", "advise" for "advice", a missing article — so it replaces one proofreading job, not the whole pass.

Tip: Do not rewrite sentences purely to move the counter. Rewriting under time pressure creates new errors faster than it removes old ones, and the counter is not what the raters are reading.

6A word-count plan that survives exam nerves

A plan you have to think about is a plan that collapses at minute 20. This one is arithmetic you do once, at home, and then never again.

Target 175 words, not 150 and not 200. Aiming at the middle means a 25-word miss in either direction still lands you inside the range. Aiming at 150 means any nervous trimming puts you under; aiming at 200 means any extra sentence puts you over.

Map that onto the 27 minutes. The official study pack recommends around 4-5 minutes of planning before you write and around 3 minutes of checking after. That leaves about 19-20 minutes of writing for roughly 175 words — under ten words a minute, which is slow enough to think.

If you are practising on paper, where there is no counter, use line arithmetic instead of counting. Count the words in one full handwritten line once, at home — for most people it is 9 to 11. Then on test day, count lines and multiply. Sixteen full lines at ten words is 160; you are in range and you know it in five seconds.

If you come up short, add a specific to a body paragraph you already have: a date, a name, an amount, a place, or what somebody actually said. Never add a paragraph.

If you come up long, cut in this order: intensifiers first ("very", "really", "actually", "quite"), then any sentence that repeats a point you already made, then collapse two short sentences into one. Cutting a whole idea should be the last resort, because completeness is scored and elegance is not.

7Paragraph shapes: how many sentences per paragraph at 175 words

At 175 words you have room for roughly 11 to 13 sentences at an average of 14 to 16 words each. Knowing that in advance stops you from writing a 40-word opening sentence and discovering at minute 22 that you have no room left.

Sentence length should vary, and the variation is itself scored: Readability includes grammar and sentence structure, and the published analysis of an official Level 12 sample praises a wide range of sentence structures including complex sentences and a parenthetical phrase. A useful mix in a dozen sentences is a handful of short ones, a majority in the 12-18 word band, and two longer complex sentences.

If the prompt asks you to do three things and you only have two body paragraphs, do not panic. Two of the three usually belong together — the description of a problem and its effect on you, for example — and the third is often the request, which naturally lives in the closing paragraph. Three tasks does not mean three paragraphs.

Tip: If one of your body paragraphs runs past six sentences, it is carrying two ideas. Split it or cut one. A long paragraph is where raters find both repetition and buried tasks.

8Register: what "neither too formal nor too informal" means here

This is the part most Task 1 advice gets subtly wrong, and the official guidance is unusually direct about it.

Paragon's own summary of Task 1 says the formality should be neither too formal nor too informal: this is not an email to a friend or family member, but also not to a member of the government. Task 1 is an everyday email to someone you have a real but not intimate reason to write to — a librarian, a manager, a landlord, a school, a company.

That guidance matches the published prompts. The official sample prompt is an email to the chief librarian. The study-pack prompt is a teacher inviting an author to speak to her class. Both recipients are strangers in a role, and both official high-scoring responses are polite, warm and human rather than stiff.

Too formal reads as a legal letter: "Please be advised that the undersigned wishes to lodge a formal complaint regarding the aforementioned matter." It is grammatically fine and tonally wrong, and tone is a named factor under Task Fulfillment.

Too informal reads as a text message: "Hey! So the washers are busted again lol, can someone fix them?" Contractions are not the problem; slang, missing capitals and exclamation-heavy phrasing are.

The register that fits almost every Task 1 prompt is polite, direct, contraction-light and specific. Full sentences. "I am writing about…" or "I would appreciate it if…". A named greeting where the prompt gives you a name. One clear request. No sarcasm, even in a complaint.

If a prompt does name a friend or family member as the recipient, write to that person — warmer, contractions welcome, still organised and still doing all three things. The official steer describes the typical Task 1 email, not a ban on ever writing informally.

9Greetings and sign-offs, by register

Pick these before you write the first body sentence. Choosing them at the end is how mismatched openings and closings happen.

Small mechanical points that sit under Readability: a comma after the greeting, a capital letter starting the first word of the email, a comma after the sign-off, and your name on its own line. Do not write "Dear Sir or Madam" and then use the person's name three lines later.

Tip: When the prompt gives you a name, use it. "Dear Sir or Madam" in reply to a named recipient reads as though you did not read the instructions — and relevance is a Task Fulfillment factor.

10Reading the prompt to decide the register

The prompt tells you the register in the first two lines, if you read it for that. Spend thirty seconds of your planning time on this and the rest of the email writes itself in the right voice.

• Who is the recipient, and are they named? A named individual in a role means semi-formal with a named greeting. An unnamed office means semi-formal with "Dear Sir or Madam,".
• What is the relationship? Have you met this person, do you pay them, do they serve you, or are they a stranger? Nothing in a Task 1 prompt is accidental — the background panel on the left is there to set this.
• What is the purpose? A complaint, a request, an apology, an invitation, an explanation. The purpose sets how direct the closing line can be.
• How many things does the email have to do? Count the bullets in the instruction panel and write the count in the corner of your scratch paper before you start.
• Is there a deadline or a specific fact in the background? Dates, amounts and names in the prompt are free specifics — use them rather than inventing new ones.

Words in the background information do half the work for you. "Your building manager", "the customer service department", "your child's school" all point to semi-formal. "Your friend", "your cousin", "your former roommate" point to informal. If neither appears, default to semi-formal — it is the register the official guidance describes as typical.

The bullets in the instruction panel are also your paragraph plan. Write them as three short notes, decide which two share a paragraph, and you have finished planning in under two minutes.

11The formatting rules Readability actually rewards

Readability is one of the four dimensions, and its first named factor is format and paragraphing. This is the cheapest dimension to improve, because it costs nothing but layout.

Start with a greeting on its own line, followed by a blank line. An email that starts straight into "I am writing about the laundry room" with no salutation loses format marks before the rater reads a word of content.

Use blank lines between paragraphs, not indents. The published analysis of an official Level 9 sample lists "lack of paragraphing" as a weakness even though the content was strong — one wall of text is visibly scored.

Connectors and transitions are the second named Readability factor. One connector at the start of each body paragraph is enough: "In addition,", "However,", "As a result,", "For this reason,". The official analysis of a weaker sample flags "a very narrow range of transitions" — variety matters more than quantity.

Close with a line before the sign-off. Going from your last body sentence straight to "Kind regards," leaves the email unfinished. One sentence that says what you want next is enough: "Could you let me know by Friday whether this is possible?"

A subject line is not asked for in the official instructions and is not part of the published sample responses. Writing one is not an error, but it spends words on something nobody asked for.

12The structure that fits 150-200 words

Four moves, in this order. It is not the only structure that works, but it is the one that fits the range without padding or cutting.

Tip: Every one of the three things the prompt asks for must land in one of these four moves. Before you write the sign-off, put your finger on each bullet in the instruction panel and find it in your draft.

13Where people lose points on length and format

These are the recurring failures on the length-and-format side of Task 1. None of them are about English ability, which is what makes them worth fixing first.

• Counting words instead of writing them. There is an automatic word count on screen. Time spent counting is time not spent on the specific detail that actually moves Content/Coherence.
• Padding to reach 150. Filler sentences add errors and repetition without adding ideas, and both are scored. A 150-word email of padding scores below a 140-word email of substance.
• Writing a fourth and fifth paragraph to feel thorough. The task asks for around three things. More paragraphs usually means a point nobody asked for, and relevance is a Task Fulfillment factor.
• One wall of text. Format and paragraphing is the first named factor under Readability, and it is visibly scored even when the content is strong.
• No closing line before the sign-off. The email reads as unfinished, and the request that the whole email was building toward never gets stated.
• Mismatched greeting and sign-off. "Dear Sir or Madam" opening with "Talk soon" closing is the classic tell of a memorised template applied without reading the prompt.
• Copying the prompt's sentences into the email. It burns words that do not count as your own language, and Vocabulary is rated on your range, not the prompt's.
• Leaving one of the three things out. This is by far the most expensive error on this task, and it usually happens to people who ran long on the first two and ran out of time.

14A worked example at the right length, counted honestly

Prompt: Two of the three washing machines in your apartment building's laundry room have been broken for two weeks. Write an email to the building manager. Your email should do the following things: describe the problem, explain how it is affecting you, and say what you would like done.

Dear Ms. Whitfield, I am writing about the laundry room in the North Tower, where two of the three washing machines have been out of order since September 8th. The remaining machine is now in constant use. Last Saturday I waited from nine in the morning until almost noon for a free cycle, and I have seen neighbours carrying full baskets back upstairs because the queue was too long. A handwritten sign has been taped to both machines for over two weeks, but I have not seen a technician in the building. This is becoming difficult for residents who work weekdays and can only do laundry at the weekend. I have started driving to a laundromat on Main Street, which costs me about twenty dollars a month that I had not budgeted for. Two neighbours on my floor have told me they are doing the same. Could you let me know when the two machines will be repaired or replaced? A note in the lobby with a date would reassure everyone. Thank you for your help. Kind regards, Daniel Osei

Word count: 180, counted including the greeting and the sign-off. That is the middle of the range, reached without padding and without cutting anything the prompt asked for.

Structure check: greeting, purpose sentence with a date in it, two body paragraphs each carrying one specific (a time span and a street, an amount of money), a closing paragraph that states the request, a short thanks, and a semi-formal sign-off with a full name. Five blank-line breaks, so the format is readable in two seconds.

Task check: the problem is described in paragraph one and evidenced in paragraph two, the effect on the writer is in paragraph three, and the request is in paragraph four. All three things the prompt asked for are present and findable.

Register check: no contractions, no slang, no sarcasm about the sign on the machines, one named greeting, one direct question. Polite and specific — neither too formal nor too informal, which is what the official guidance asks for.

Tip: Notice what carries the weight: "nine in the morning until almost noon", "September 8th", "Main Street", "twenty dollars a month". Remove those four specifics and the email loses about fifteen words — and, more importantly, everything a rater could picture.

15Practise it free, and where to go next

Format knowledge only becomes a score once you have written the email under a clock several times. Three things are worth doing next, in this order.

First, sit a timed task. FlexiLingo's free CELPIP practice test is at flexilingo.com/products/celpip/demo — no payment, no trial. Write Task 1 in 27 minutes, with 4-5 minutes of planning and 3 minutes of checking, exactly as the official study pack recommends. Do not look up words while the clock runs.

Second, if you want the sentence-by-sentence skeleton — the eight blocks, the opening patterns by prompt type, the vocabulary upgrades — that is a separate guide: CELPIP Writing Task 1: The Email Template That Hits CLB 9+. It is the how-to-build-it companion to this article's how-long-and-what-shape.

Third, read full model emails for different scenarios. CELPIP Writing Task 1: Sample Emails for Every Scenario gives complete complaint, request and informal emails with the phrases that carry them. Both guides are linked below.

The practice loop that works: write one timed email, check it against the four dimensions rather than against a feeling, then rewrite the same email once, changing only what you found. The rewrite is where the improvement lives. Two emails reviewed properly beats six written and forgotten.

Tip: Type your practice emails rather than handwriting them. The real task is typed, the word counter is on screen, and typing speed changes how much of the 27 minutes is actually available to you.