Writing: Task Achievement, Register, and Cohesion
What the tasks demand
MET writing asks you to produce a short message (usually an email or note) and a longer piece such as an opinion paragraph or short essay. Scores come from two families of criteria: task achievement - did you address every bullet, question, or instruction with the right amount of detail - and language quality, meaning organization, cohesion, vocabulary range, and grammatical accuracy.
Register is the silent score-killer
A note to a friend tolerates contractions, phrasal verbs, and exclamation marks; an email to a manager or tutor does not. Decide who is reading before your first word, then keep that voice consistent. Cohesion should come from real linking (however, because, as a result, for instance) plus pronouns and repeated key nouns - not from a memorized list of connectors bolted onto every sentence.
Traps to watch
- Answering only the easy part of the prompt while ignoring a required instruction such as "say what you will do next."
- Writing an accurate, well-organized paragraph about the wrong topic.
- Padding to reach a word limit with empty sentences instead of adding a concrete detail.
- Forcing a template that does not fit the situation.
Rule of thumb
Plan for two minutes: jot the greeting, one sentence per prompt bullet, and the closing. Each bullet then gets its own short paragraph opening with a topic sentence.
Worked example. Prompt: Email a colleague to move tomorrow's meeting and explain why. Plan: Hi Sam → purpose (move meeting) → reason (client call at the same time) → proposal (Thursday 10 a.m.) → close (does that suit?). Four sentences, roughly 80 well-chosen words, cover the task completely - better than 150 vague ones.