The Pen Pal Letter: Picking One Register and Holding It
You must write a 200–250 character letter in Japanese to your pen pal, Sato Yuki, a 17-year-old in Sapporo. Yuki's last letter ended: 「テストはどうだった？ぼくは数学がちょっとやばかった（笑）。今度、文化祭のことを教えてね！」
Your brief: say what your class did at the cultural festival, one thing that went well, and one thing to improve next year. Your class ran a yakisoba stall; you sold out by 1 pm; you ran out of chopsticks and change by noon. You also want to ask Yuki about the Sapporo snow festival.
Your teacher's note on your first draft: 'Register is inconsistent - ですます in paragraph one, だ／だった in paragraph two. Pick one and hold it. Also, your draft runs to 310 characters.'
1. Which register do you choose, and why? Write your opening two lines.
Read the worked answer
Choose ですます. Yuki writes plain forms (だった, 教えてね), which signals an informal relationship, but the piece is assessed on control, and ですます is controlled by far more candidates than plain form - mixing だ and です inside one letter is precisely the fault the teacher flagged. Consistency beats casualness; a letter that is uniformly polite to a peer is never wrong, while a letter that wobbles reads as ungrammatical. Opening: 「佐藤さん、お元気ですか。私は元気です。手紙をくれて、ありがとうございました。」 Avoid three things: 拝啓／敬具 (formal letter convention, absurd between teenagers), 親愛なる佐藤さん (translationese), and ヤッホー-style openings (too casual for a written assessment). One greeting, one health enquiry, one thank-you - six lines of your budget spent.
2. Write the middle section, then mark where you used a counter and where tense matters.
Read the worked answer
「文化祭では、私たちのクラスはやきそばの屋台を出しました。三百ぱいぐらい売れて、午後1時にぜんぶ売り切れました。でも、お昼ごろにはしとおつりが足りなくなって、お客さんに少し待ってもらいました。来年は、はしを五百ぜんぶんと、千円玉をたくさん用意したいです。」
Counters: 〜ぱい（杯） for servings of noodles; 〜ぜん（膳） for pairs of chopsticks, or 本 if you count them singly. Tense: every completed event is 〜ました (出しました、売り切れました、足りなくなりました), and the plan for next year is 〜たいです, not past. 〜てもらいました carries the thank-you nuance for customers who waited - a Level 2 structure used for a reason rather than decoration. Note that 売れました and 売り切れました are not interchangeable: the second is what supports 'one thing that went well', so the vocabulary choice is doing argumentative work, not just filling space.
3. The draft is 310 characters against a 250 limit. How do you cut, and what should the final two lines be?
Read the worked answer
250 characters on 原稿用紙 is roughly six or seven short sentences: greeting (1), festival (2), what worked (1), what failed (1), next year (1), closing (1). Cut by deleting whole clauses, not by shaving adjectives - drop the second half of the chopsticks-and-change problem and keep one, and delete any decorative katakana nouns. Rewrite rather than trim: a 60-character overshoot cannot be fixed by removing particles. Closing: 「じゃあ、また手紙を書きますね。お返事、待っています。さようなら。〇〇より」 - one closing formula, then name plus より. Do not stack 敬具 onto ですます friendly content (mismatched register), and do not add 追伸 after the signature; a postscript after your own name looks untidy in an assessed letter and adds characters you do not have.