How many writing tasks are on the updated TOEFL?

Three: 10 Build a Sentence items, one email, and one academic discussion post. The 10 sentence items are worth as much as both pieces of writing put together.

How long should a TOEFL email be?

ETS does not publish a required word count for Write an Email. Focus on completing the task clearly, addressing the important points, and developing your reply enough to communicate effectively. Very short replies often lack the development a strong score needs.

How long should the academic discussion post be?

ETS guidance suggests writing at least about 100 words for an effective response, but there is no official 120 to 160 word requirement. What matters far more than length is a clear contribution of your own, developed with a concrete reason or example.

Do typos lower your TOEFL Writing score?

One or two minor typos in timed writing do not by themselves stop you reaching a top band. What costs you marks is errors dense enough to obscure your meaning, or a task goal you never addressed.

TOEFL Writing

How TOEFL Writing is scored

The updated TOEFL iBT Writing section has three tasks, and most people prepare for the wrong one. This page explains how the three combine into a single 1 to 6 band, what raters reward at each level, and why the task candidates ignore is worth as much as the other two writing tasks combined.

The part almost nobody plans for

Writing is scored out of a raw 20, and everyone sits the same three tasks: unlike Reading and Listening, Writing is not adaptive. The raw 20 is made up like this:

How the Writing raw score of 20 is made up
Task	Worth
Build a Sentence10 items	10 points
Write an Email	5 points
Academic Discussion	5 points

Read that again. Build a Sentence is half the raw score. Its 10 points, each item worth one point, equal the combined maximum of Write an Email and the Academic Discussion together. Build a Sentence is also the most learnable part of the whole exam, because word order is a rule you can drill rather than a skill you slowly acquire.

Most candidates spend their preparation on Write an Email and the Academic Discussion and treat the sentence items as a warm-up. That is the single cheapest score you are leaving on the table.

The email, score by score

You are given a situation and three things you must do in your reply. Those three bullets are the task. Everything else is presentation.

Email scoring, 0 to 5
Score	What it means
5Fully successful	All three goals addressed and genuinely developed, in an appropriate tone with the normal conventions of an email. At most an isolated slip.
4Generally successful	All three goals addressed and adequately developed. Easy to understand, with a few errors that never obscure meaning.
3Partially successful	The task is broadly done, but some goals are only mentioned rather than developed, or the language gets in the way in places.
2Mostly unsuccessful	An attempt, but poorly developed or partly off the point, with errors that accumulate enough to strain the reader.
1Unsuccessful	Very little development, disconnected language, or mostly words borrowed from the prompt itself.
0No response	Blank, off topic, not in English, or copied wholesale from the prompt.

Why some emails score lower

Write an Email is scored holistically: the rater judges how well the whole reply achieves its purpose for the reader. Leaving out, or barely touching, one of the things the task asks you to do means the reply does less of its job, so it usually scores lower. Simply mentioning a point is weaker than developing it with a reason, a detail or an example of your own.

This is why a warm, fluent, grammatically perfect email can still score low if it does not actually do what the task asked. Good English is not the same as completing the task. The email task explained in detail walks through a real example.

The academic discussion, score by score

A professor poses a question and two classmates have already replied. You add a post. The trap here is different from the email: the task is not to be agreeable, it is to contribute something.

Academic discussion scoring, 0 to 5
Score	What it means
5Fully successful	A clear contribution of your own, well developed with concrete support in your own words. You might agree with, disagree with, or build on a classmate's idea, or add your own relevant point. Treats the question as a trade-off rather than a flat yes or no.
4Generally successful	A relevant, easily understood contribution with adequate development and few errors, but less fully developed than a top answer.
3Partially successful	Mostly relevant, but part of an explanation or example is missing, unclear, or does not quite fit.
2Mostly unsuccessful	Ideas are hard to follow, thinly developed, or only partly relevant to the professor's question.
1Unsuccessful	Few coherent ideas, or language borrowed almost entirely from the posts above.
0No response	Blank, off topic, not in English, or copied from the prompt.

Why some posts score lower

The Academic Discussion is scored holistically. A response that does not make a clear contribution of its own, or that stays at the level of general claims (“it is good”, “everyone knows this”) without real development, does less of what the task asks and usually scores lower. You do not have to reply to a classmate: agreeing, disagreeing, building on their idea, or adding your own relevant point all work, as long as you develop it clearly.

What a band 5 discussion post looks like

The professor has asked whether recorded lectures should replace attending in person. A classmate, Maria, has argued they let students fall behind.

“I take the opposite view from Maria, though I understand why she holds it. She argues that recordings let students fall behind, and that is certainly what happens to some. But the students who stop attending were rarely kept there by the lecture itself, they were kept by the timetable. What recordings change is who can study at all. A classmate of mine cared for her mother through her second year and finished only because she could watch at eleven at night.”

What makes this strong, and none of it is vocabulary: it takes a clear position and develops it in the writer’s own words, it concedes something before disagreeing (which makes it read as a discussion rather than a speech), and it supports the position with one concrete detail rather than a generalisation. Engaging with Maria is one good way to contribute here, but you could also introduce your own relevant idea instead. You could write this with ordinary words and still score well.

Common questions

How many writing tasks are on the updated TOEFL?: Three: 10 Build a Sentence items, one email, and one academic discussion post. The 10 sentence items are worth as much as both pieces of writing put together.
How long should a TOEFL email be?: ETS does not publish a required word count for Write an Email. Focus on completing the task clearly, addressing the important points, and developing your reply enough to communicate effectively. Very short replies often lack the development a strong score needs.
How long should the academic discussion post be?: ETS guidance suggests writing at least about 100 words for an effective response, but there is no official 120 to 160 word requirement. What matters far more than length is a clear contribution of your own, developed with a concrete reason or example.
Do typos lower your TOEFL Writing score?: One or two minor typos in timed writing do not by themselves stop you reaching a top band. What costs you marks is errors dense enough to obscure your meaning, or a task goal you never addressed.

Find out where you actually are

These drills are free with an account and take a few minutes each. They are marked against the same bands described above, so you find out whether you are really addressing all three parts of the task rather than assuming you are.

Try an email drill Try a discussion drill Try Build a Sentence

Practice bands are an estimate to help you prepare. They are not an ETS score and are not reported to anyone.