Writing
What is tested
Writing tasks typically pair an interpersonal message (email, note, short letter) with a presentational piece (essay, article, or formal letter) on a personal or cultural topic. Scoring weighs task completion, comprehensibility, vocabulary range, grammatical control, and cultural appropriateness.
Concepts to master
- Register control: tu vs vous, openings (Madame, Monsieur,), closings (Cordialement, Bien à vous), and consistency throughout.
- Full task completion: every bullet in the prompt must appear explicitly, not merely be implied.
- Cohesion: connectors of addition, contrast, cause, and conclusion, plus sensible paragraphing.
- Tense and mood: passé composé vs imparfait, plus-que-parfait for prior events, future and conditional for plans and hypotheses, subjunctive after il faut que, bien que, avant que.
- Accuracy habits: article and adjective agreement, participle agreement with être and with a preceding direct object, and written accents that change meaning (ou/où, a/à).
- Avoid calques; prefer idiomatic French phrasing over word-for-word translation from English.
Traps
The commonest failure is partial task completion - a polished paragraph that ignores one prompt element. Next is register drift, especially slipping from vous to tu mid-message. Third is ambition outpacing control: elaborate subordination with broken agreement scores lower than clear, correct simple sentences.
Worked example
Prompt: write to your host family to decline a dinner invitation and propose another date. A weak answer apologizes at length but never proposes a date. A strong answer: « Je vous remercie de votre invitation, mais je ne pourrai pas venir samedi soir. Serait-il possible de dîner ensemble le dimanche suivant ? » - polite vous, a clear refusal, and a concrete alternative.
Rule of thumb: plan for two minutes, write for most of the time, and reserve the final three minutes to proofread only for agreement, tense consistency, and accents - the errors graders notice most.