How to End an IELTS Letter: The Three Lines That Finish the Task

An IELTS General Training letter ends with three things, in this order: a closing line, a sign-off, and your name. Candidates lose marks at the end of a letter for one reason more than any other: the sign-off they chose does not match the greeting they used at the top.

The rule is simple, and it is decided by the greeting, not by the subject of the letter. If you wrote Dear Sir or Madam, you end with Yours faithfully. If you wrote Dear Mr Patel, you end with Yours sincerely. If you wrote Dear Anna, you end with something warm such as Best wishes.

This guide gives you the decision table, the four closing lines that work in every letter, and what I found when I read the endings of real letter answers.

What the ending has to contain

General Training Writing Task 1 asks you to write a letter of at least 150 words in about 20 minutes. The question gives you a greeting to use and three bullet points to cover. The task itself is described here, and the ending is the last four or five lines of it.

Those lines contain three separate things. Candidates often write one and skip the other two.

1. The closing line. One or two sentences of ordinary prose, inside your last paragraph or on its own line. It says what you want to happen next.
2. The sign-off. A fixed phrase such as Yours faithfully, followed by a comma.
3. Your name. On the line below the sign-off.

Leaving out the sign-off and the name is the version of this error that costs the most, because the task asks for a letter, and a letter without a sign-off is not finished. Leaving out the closing line is less visible but it wastes the easiest sentence in the whole paper.

The decision table

The greeting decides the sign-off. Nothing else does. Not the topic, not whether the news is good or bad, and not how polite you feel.

Two notes on that table, because both come up in every class.

Yours faithfully goes with Sir or Madam, and only with that. Yours faithfully means "I am writing to a person whose name I do not have". Writing Dear Mr Patel and then Yours faithfully contradicts itself in two lines. This is the single most common ending error.

These are conventions of English letter writing, not published IELTS rules. The official band descriptors do not contain a list of approved sign-offs. What they do contain, under Task Achievement, is a requirement that the tone is consistent and appropriate for the reader. A sign-off that fights the greeting is the clearest possible failure of consistent tone, which is why it matters. Read it as a tone question, not as a rule you can be fined for breaking.

The closing line: four that work

The closing line is a gift. It is one or two sentences that fit almost any letter, and you can decide them before you read the question.

For a formal letter, say what you want to happen next.

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.

I would be grateful if you could confirm this arrangement in writing.

For a complaint, name the outcome you want. This is also how you cover the third bullet point in most complaint tasks.

I trust that you will be able to resolve this matter promptly, and I look forward to your reply.

For an informal letter, keep it personal and keep it short.

Do write back and let me know what you decide.

Thank you again for everything, and I hope to see you soon.

What a closing line must not do is introduce a new idea. A new idea in the last sentence is an idea with no support, and a letter that ends on an unsupported point reads as unfinished. Save your development for the body.

What real letter endings look like

Most pages on this subject give you a list of sign-offs. None of them show you what the ending looks like in a complete answer with a band estimate beside it, so here is that.

Bandly's library has four published General Training letter samples. I read the last lines of each one. The table below records the greeting, the closing line and the sign-off exactly as they appear, with the band the Bandly engine estimated for the whole letter.

Three things fall out of that, and I counted each one in the four texts.

All four close with a line about future contact before the sign-off. I look forward to hearing from you, I look forward to your response, please write back soon, I hope we can resolve this matter. Not one of the four stops at the last body point and jumps straight to the sign-off. That is a pattern worth copying, and it is the easiest sentence in the letter to prepare in advance.

Three of the four match the greeting correctly. Dear Sir or Madam with Yours faithfully, Dear Mr. Henderson with Yours sincerely, Dear John with Best regards. Each of those pairs is internally consistent.

The one that does not match is the lowest estimated of the four. The host family letter opens Dear Mr and Mrs Smith and ends Yours sincerely, John. The task is a thank you letter to people the writer lived with, which is a warm, semi formal situation, and Yours sincerely with a first name underneath is colder than the letter above it. That letter is estimated at band 6, the lowest of the four.

Be careful with that last observation. Four letters is a small number, those bands are estimates produced by Bandly's own scoring engine rather than marks from a qualified examiner, and that letter has other problems in it, including Your family was so kind of me and If you will come to my country. The mismatch is one feature of a weaker letter, not the cause of the band. What the count does show honestly is that endings in stronger answers tend to be consistent and endings in weaker answers tend not to be.

Before and after: three endings rewritten

Here are three endings of the kind that appear in real practice answers, with what changed and why.

One. The greeting and the sign-off disagree.

Before. Dear Mr Patel, ... I hope you will consider my request. Yours faithfully, R. Kumar

After. Dear Mr Patel, ... I hope you will consider my request. Yours sincerely, Rahul Kumar

Yours faithfully claims you do not know the name, and the greeting proves you do. The initial also goes: in a formal letter your full name is clearer than an initial.

Two. There is no closing line and no sign-off.

Before. ... so please send someone to repair the heating as soon as possible. John

After. ... so please send someone to repair the heating as soon as possible. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Yours faithfully, John Smith

The original stops mid task. Two short lines finish it, and neither line needed an idea.

Three. The register slips at the last moment.

Before. Dear Sir or Madam, ... Thanks a lot for your help with this, cheers, Maria

After. Dear Sir or Madam, ... Thank you for your assistance with this matter. Yours faithfully, Maria Costa

Thanks a lot and cheers are informal. The letter spent 150 words being formal and then changed register in its final six words, which is exactly the inconsistency the tone requirement is reading for. If you are unsure where the line sits, formal register in IELTS writing sets it out, and the formal letter guide shows a complete one.

Punctuation and layout of the last three lines

Small details, all of them quick.

1. Put a comma after the sign-off: Yours sincerely, not Yours sincerely.
2. Capitalise the first word only: Yours faithfully, not Yours Faithfully.
3. Your name goes on a new line. On the computer delivered test, press Enter. On paper, start a new line.
4. Do not write your address. The question says you do not need to, and addresses are not marked.
5. Do not sign a signature. Your typed or handwritten name is enough.
6. Do not add a job title or a phone number unless the task asked for it. Extra information that the bullets did not request uses words you need elsewhere.

A checklist for the last 30 seconds

You will have very little time at the end of Task 1. Four checks, in this order.

1. Look at the greeting at the top of your letter. Then look at your sign-off. Do they agree, using the table above?
2. Is there a name under the sign-off? Full name for a formal letter, first name for an informal one.
3. Is there a sentence before the sign-off that says what happens next? If not, add one. It takes eight words.
4. Read your last sentence and your first sentence together. If one is warm and the other is cold, the letter is inconsistent, and the ending is the cheaper one to fix.

Practising this

Endings are the easiest part of Task 1 to make automatic, because there are only three patterns and the question hands you the one you need in its greeting. Write the ending for five different letter tasks in ten minutes, without writing the bodies. That drill is worth more than reading another list.

Then write one complete letter under timed conditions and paste it into Bandly to see what the four criteria report back. The band is an estimate and has not been checked against a qualified examiner, so read the criterion comments rather than the number: what you want to know is whether the tone was read as consistent from the greeting to the name. Comparing your letter with the published letter samples and with how to open a letter will show you the same thing from the other end.