Written Production and Interaction (Producción escrita)
Written production normally means two tasks: a transactional text (email, message, letter of complaint or request) and an opinion, narrative, blog post or article. Marks reward task achievement, organisation and cohesion, range of language and accuracy - so a clear B1 text with few errors beats an ambitious text full of mistakes.
Before you write
- Underline audience, register (tú/usted), purpose and every bullet point. A missed bullet is a lost mark that no grammar can recover.
- Spend three minutes planning: one idea per bullet, plus the tense or function each idea needs.
- Know the frame: informal email (Hola Pablo: ... Un abrazo), formal email (Estimado señor: ... Le saludo atentamente / Quedo a la espera de su respuesta), article (title, direct question to the reader), story (time markers: al principio, de repente, al final).
Sentence-level quality
- Signpost each paragraph: En primer lugar, Por un lado ... por otro, Sin embargo, En conclusión.
- Show range deliberately: preterite/imperfect contrast in narratives; subjunctive in opinions (no creo que sea justo, es necesario que se tomen medidas); conditional for polite requests (me gustaría, ¿podrías...?).
- Vary linkers instead of repeating y, pero, también.
- Reserve the last five minutes for agreement, accents and verb endings - checking earns more than a sixth paragraph.
Worked example
Prompt: «Correo a tu amigo Pablo (100–120 palabras): discúlpate por no haber ido a su fiesta, explica el motivo y propón otro plan.» Model opening: «¡Hola, Pablo! Lo siento muchísimo, pero no pude ir a tu fiesta: tuve que acompañar a mi madre al hospital. ¿Te apetecería quedar el sábado para tomar algo?» Reasoning: pude is preterite because the impossibility is one completed event; tuve que expresses past obligation; the conditional question is the polite proposal the third bullet demands. All three bullets are covered in two sentences, so the rest of the text can develop reasons and details.
Traps
- Writing an essay when the task is an email: no salutation, no closing, register lost.
- Mixing tú and usted inside one text.
- Copying the rubric into the answer to reach the word limit.
- Long memorised introductions that push you off topic or past the limit.
- Ignoring the word range in either direction, and writing unparagraphed blocks.