Write an Emailpractice, with purpose.

The five practice prompts

These are LingoLeap's own practice prompts, inspired by TOEFL task patterns — not actual test questions. Each one comes from one of our Write an Email guides, where you can also read a sample response.

1. Prompt 1 · Emailing a professor

   You are taking an introductory biology course and have been struggling with the material covered in the last two lectures. You have an upcoming midterm exam next week and would like to meet with your professor to clarify some concepts.

   Write an email to Professor Chen. In your email, do the following:

   • Describe which topics you are finding difficult and why.
   • Explain why meeting before the midterm would be helpful for you.
   • Request a specific time to meet during office hours or suggest an alternative.
   Sample email and strategy for this prompt →

2. Prompt 2 · Campus services

   Your dormitory Wi-Fi has been extremely slow every evening for the past two weeks, making it nearly impossible to submit assignments online or join virtual study sessions.

   Write an email to the campus IT Help Desk. In your email, do the following:

   • Describe the connectivity problem and when it occurs
   • Explain how it is affecting your coursework and deadlines
   • Request that the IT team investigate and resolve the issue
   Sample email and strategy for this prompt →

3. Prompt 3 · Complaint

   Your dormitory neighbor in the room next to yours plays loud music every night past midnight. You have spoken to them twice, but the noise has not stopped. You are losing sleep and your academic performance is suffering.

   Write an email to the Housing Office. In your email, do the following:

   • Describe the noise problem and how long it has been happening
   • Explain how the situation is affecting your sleep and studies
   • Request a specific action the housing office can take to resolve the issue
   Sample email and strategy for this prompt →

4. Prompt 4 · Emailing a classmate

   Your group project for sociology class is falling behind because tasks have not been divided clearly.

   Write an email to your classmate Jordan. In your email, do the following:

   • Suggest a way to divide the remaining work between group members
   • Propose a deadline for each section so the project stays on track
   • Ask if the arrangement works or if they prefer a different split
   Sample email and strategy for this prompt →

5. Prompt 5 · Scheduling

   You are a university student. A mandatory chemistry lab section was just added to your schedule on Wednesday afternoons, which now conflicts with your professor's regular office hours from 2:00 to 3:30 PM. You still need to meet with Professor Davis to discuss your research paper.

   Write an email to Professor Davis. In your email, do the following:

   • Explain why you can no longer attend the regular Wednesday office hours.
   • Propose two specific alternative times when you are available to meet.
   • Express your willingness to adjust to whatever time works best for the professor.
   Sample email and strategy for this prompt →

How the task works

Write an Email is the second task in the TOEFL 2026 Writing section, between Build a Sentence and Academic Discussion. You read a short scenario — usually a situation a university student runs into — and write an email to the person it names. The prompt lists three things your email has to do, and you have about seven minutes to read it and write.

The three points are the backbone of your score. An email that handles two of them well and skips the third reads as an incomplete message, however polished the sentences are. The recipient decides the register: formal for a professor or an office, semi-formal for a classmate.

For the format, the rubric and worked examples, read the TOEFL 2026 Write an Email guide or browse common Write an Email topics.

What your score means

You get one overall score from 0 to 5, in half points, and a score and comment for each of four criteria:

• Content — whether your elaboration supports what the email is for.
• Syntactic and lexical variety — a range of sentence structures and precise, idiomatic word choice.
• Social conventions — politeness, register, organisation, and how you phrase requests, refusals or complaints.
• Accuracy — lexical and grammatical errors. Occasional slips of the kind anyone makes under time pressure are expected.

The overall score is not an average. Correct grammar with basic vocabulary, or an informal tone to a professor, holds the overall score down even when accuracy is high — which is why a clean but plain email often lands at 3 to 3.5.

There is no band score for a single email. TOEFL reports the 1–6 Writing band for the whole section, so the drill — like the LingoLeap app — reports the task on its own 0–5 scale. This is LingoLeap's AI estimate, not an official ETS score. For how raters apply the scale across all writing tasks, see TOEFL writing rubrics.

Frequently asked questions