How to Start an IELTS Letter: Dear Sir, Dear Mr Smith, or Dear John?

In IELTS General Training Task 1 you write a letter. The first line you write is the greeting, and it does more work than any other line in the answer. It tells the examiner which register you have chosen, and everything after it has to agree with that choice.

Get the greeting right and the rest of the letter tends to follow. Get it wrong and you spend 150 words fighting your own opening.

The rule in one line

Look at who the letter is addressed to, then ask one question: do you know this person's name?

That is the whole decision. Candidates lose marks here not because the rule is complicated but because the task wording is read too quickly.

The neighbour problem

The most searched letter scenario in IELTS is a letter to a neighbour, usually a complaint about noise. It is also the scenario where register goes wrong most often, because a neighbour sits in the middle.

You are not writing to a stranger, so "Dear Sir or Madam" is too cold. You are not writing to a close friend, so "Hi Dave!" is too warm. A neighbour is semi-formal.

If the task gives you a name, use it:

Dear Mr Wilson,

If the task does not give you a name, you still should not open with "Dear Neighbour". It reads as a printed notice pushed through a door, not a letter. Use:

Dear Sir or Madam,

and then make the body polite rather than distant. Semi-formal register lives in the sentences, not only in the greeting.

Match the sign-off to the greeting

This is a fixed pairing in British English and examiners notice when it breaks.

The pair to memorise is the first two. No name means faithfully; a name means sincerely. Many candidates write "Dear Sir or Madam" and close with "Yours sincerely", which is the single most common mechanical error in General Training Task 1.

Then sign with your name on the next line. If you opened formally, use a full name. If you opened informally, a first name is enough.

What follows the greeting

The first sentence of the body should state why you are writing. Not a warm-up, not weather, not "I hope this letter finds you well" in a complaint. State the purpose.

Formal:

I am writing to complain about the level of noise coming from your property over the past three weeks.

Semi-formal:

I am writing to ask whether something can be done about the noise from your flat in the evenings.

Informal:

I thought I would write and let you know I have finally moved into the new place.

Notice that all three are one sentence and all three name the subject. The examiner is checking that the letter's purpose is clear from the opening. In the public band descriptors, a letter whose purpose is unclear cannot reach the higher bands for Task Achievement, no matter how accurate the grammar is.

Register is more than the greeting

Once you have chosen, hold the choice for the whole letter. These are the things that break register halfway through:

Contractions. Do not use I'm, don't or can't in a formal letter. They are fine and natural in an informal one.

Phrasal verbs. Formal letters prefer single verbs: request rather than ask for, tolerate rather than put up with, resolve rather than sort out. Informal letters prefer the phrasal versions, and forcing formal vocabulary into a letter to a friend sounds just as wrong.

Directness. Formal English softens demands. "You must stop" becomes "I would be grateful if you could". Informal English does not need the padding.

Exclamation marks and emojis. Fine in a letter to a friend. Never in the other two.

A worked opening, three ways

Same situation, a neighbour whose dog barks at night, at three registers.

Formal, no name given:

Dear Sir or Madam, I am writing to raise a concern regarding the noise from your property. For the past month, your dog has barked continuously between midnight and two in the morning, and the disturbance is now affecting my family's sleep.

Semi-formal, name given:

Dear Mr Wilson, I am writing about your dog, Buster. I am sorry to raise it, but he has been barking most nights over the last month, usually well after midnight, and we are finding it difficult to sleep.

Informal, a friend who lives next door:

Dear Dave, I need to ask you a favour about Buster. He has been barking at night for weeks now and it is keeping the whole house awake.

The information is identical in all three. Only the distance changes.

Checklist before you start writing

1. Read the task line again and find the name, or confirm there is not one.
2. Decide the register from the relationship, not from the topic. A complaint can be informal; an invitation can be formal.
3. Write the greeting and the sign-off first, as a pair, before you write the body.
4. Cover all three bullet points in the task. Each one usually earns its own paragraph.
5. Keep the purpose in sentence one.

Once you have written a full letter, mark it against the four criteria one at a time rather than reading it as a whole. If you want a fast second read, Bandly returns an estimated band per criterion and flags the sentences where register slips.