The task
The bullets under a Task 1 prompt are not suggestions about what you might mention. They are the only part of the prompt that tells you whether you have finished. Paragon's own Task 1 sample gives exactly three, and a fluent email answering two of them is a worse answer than a plainer one answering all three — Task Fulfillment is a named rating dimension, and no amount of polish elsewhere pays for a missing demand.
Task 1 is an email responding to a situation, and Paragon's sample instruction asks for "about 150-200 words". The clock is the whole Writing component: 53 minutes for two tasks, with no official per-task split published. A word counter and spell-check sit on screen, so the length is something you watch rather than guess at.
The prompt
(original AlmiWorld practice prompt)
You are a member of the Riverbend Community Centre. The centre has emailed members to say that the Saturday morning drop-in swim will end on 1 October and be replaced by a registered ten-week session on Tuesday afternoons. Write an email to the program coordinator, Ms. Okonkwo, in about 150-200 words. Your email should do the following things:
- explain how you currently use the Saturday drop-in swim
- explain why the registered session will not work for you
- suggest one change the centre could make
Count the demands before you write anything
Three bullets. Three demands. Say the number to yourself — it is what you will check against at the end:
- How you use it now — the current arrangement.
- Why the replacement fails — a reason, not a complaint.
- One change — a specific, actionable suggestion.
That count takes eight seconds and it is the highest-value habit on this task. The demand people drop is almost always the third, because by then they have spent their words being aggrieved about the second.
How to spend the minutes
Count the demands. Give each one its own paragraph — not because paragraphs are elegant, but because a paragraph you can point at is a demand you can confirm you answered. Then read the email once for nothing except that: bullet one, is it there? Bullet two? Bullet three?
That last read is not proofreading. It is a headcount.
The email
Dear Ms. Okonkwo,
I am writing about the notice that the Saturday drop-in swim will end on 1 October and be replaced by a registered Tuesday session.
My daughters, Ada and Rosalie, are six and nine, and the Saturday drop-in has been our routine for almost three years. We arrive at 9:00, they swim until 10:30, and we walk home along Wolseley Avenue. It is the one activity the three of us can do together on a day I am reliably off.
The replacement will not work for us. I work rotating twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, so I cannot promise to be free at 4:30 on ten consecutive Tuesdays, and $180 paid up front is a serious risk when I may miss half the classes. The $6 drop-in fee is what made the pool possible for us in the first place.
Could the centre keep a shorter drop-in hour on Saturday mornings — 9:00 to 10:00, say — alongside the new registered session? I would gladly help on the deck to make the staffing work.
Thank you for considering it.
Sincerely, Miriam Adeyemi
184 words — inside "about 150-200".
Read against the four dimensions
CELPIP Writing is rated on Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Readability and Task Fulfillment — the same four as Speaking, except Readability here where Speaking has Listenability.
Content/Coherence. Each paragraph does one job, in the order the reader needs: what exists now, why the change breaks it, what to do instead. The suggestion arrives after the reason, so "9:00 to 10:00" reads as a fix for a stated problem rather than a demand out of nowhere.
Vocabulary. Nothing showy — precision instead: "rotating twelve-hour shifts", "ten consecutive Tuesdays", "paid up front", "help on the deck". The specific noun does work no impressive adjective would.
Readability. The official sub-points are "Format and paragraphing; Connectors and transitions; Grammar and sentence structure; Spelling and punctuation". Format: greeting, four short paragraphs, sign-off. Transitions carry weight cheaply — "so", "in the first place". And the shortest sentence in the email, "The replacement will not work for us", is the one that announces the second demand.
Task Fulfillment. Bullet one is paragraph two, bullet two is paragraph three, bullet three is paragraph four. Nothing answered twice, nothing missing. Beneath this dimension sits the harshest rule in CELPIP: a response giving insufficient information to assess scores 0 or 1, and those two levels map to no CLB level at all.
One demand, answered twice
Bullet two, written the way most people write it:
Unfortunately, the new schedule is very inconvenient for me and my family, so it will be difficult for us to attend regularly.
And here it is as the email actually has it:
I work rotating twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, so I cannot promise to be free at 4:30 on ten consecutive Tuesdays, and $180 paid up front is a serious risk when I may miss half the classes.
Both "answer" the bullet. Only one contains anything a coordinator could act on. The first could be pasted into any complaint email ever written — and that is what makes it weak, on a scale where Content is a named dimension.
What this email is not
It is not a shape you can carry to the next prompt. The sentences that make it work could not survive a change of situation: "they swim until 10:30, and we walk home along Wolseley Avenue", "$180 paid up front is a serious risk when I may miss half the classes", "I would gladly help on the deck to make the staffing work". Move those to a prompt about a delayed parcel and they are nonsense.
This email works because of its details, and its details are the part you cannot borrow. What carries over is the habit, not the wording: count the bullets, give each a paragraph, check the count at the end.
What nobody can tell you about this email
Not a band. No page on this site will assign one, because nobody outside the rating panel can. There is no answer key for Writing, no published weighting for the four dimensions, and no published account of how your two Writing tasks combine into one Writing level. What is public is the list of dimensions and what each looks at — so that is what this page did: point at each one and show where the email supplies it.
Try one
[Write a Task 1 email →] — one full task, marked, no card required.