The 215-word email with six minutes left
Priya has 20 minutes for an Aptis Advanced Writing task: a formal email to a conference organiser asking to move her presentation to a later slot and giving a reason. Guidance is 120-150 words and two content points are required. At minute 14 she has 215 words. The grammar is accurate. The draft also contains three sentences of background about her travel, the phrase a bit of a nightmare, two contractions, and a rhetorical question (Surely you understand?). She has already proofread twice. Six minutes remain. She does not want to cut material because she believes length and complexity earn 'range' marks.
1. Should Priya cut, and where do the marks actually lie?
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She should cut, and her worry is misplaced.
- Task response rewards covering the two required points clearly - the new slot and the reason. Both survive any cut.
- Register is assessed on the whole text. One idiom or contraction can pull the email out of the formal band even if 90% of it is appropriate. Register errors are cheap to fix and expensive to leave.
- Range means variety of structure and lexis used accurately and appropriately, not volume. An irrelevant three-sentence anecdote demonstrates nothing except that she misread the audience.
- Overshooting the word guidance is not directly penalised, but it costs the time she needs for the edits above, and every extra sentence is another opportunity for error.
Cutting is therefore the higher-value action, not a concession.
2. In six minutes, what is the order of edits, and what specifically changes?
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Work from most to least consequential:
- Register (about 90 seconds).
a bit of a nightmare→presented significant difficulties. Delete the two contractions (I'm→I am,can't→cannot). Delete the rhetorical question entirely - a direct question addressed to the reader is confrontational in a formal request. - Relevance (about two minutes). Remove the three background sentences about travel. Replace them with one clause stating the reason:
due to a conflicting commitment earlier that morning. - Length and shape (about 90 seconds). Confirm the email opens with purpose and closes with a polite request plus a line offering to provide further information. Delete any paragraph that does not serve one of those functions.
- Reserve (one minute). Read only the first and last lines aloud in your head.
Note what is not on the list: re-reading the middle for grammar. She has already done it twice.
3. Why is a third proofread a poor use of the final two minutes?
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Error detection saturates. Two full passes have already caught what she is capable of noticing; a third mostly re-confirms the same text and produces the illusion of diligence.
Meanwhile, several failure modes remain completely unchecked by proofreading:
- Whether both required content points are unambiguously present (a reader should not have to infer the new slot).
- Whether the opening states the purpose within the first line.
- Whether the closing makes the request actionable.
- Whether any sentence would read as rude to a stranger.
These are task-level judgements, and they are worth more than a marginal grammar fix. The general principle for timed writing: when time is short, check whether the text does its job, not whether each sentence is perfect.