Writing: GT Letter Openings and Closings by Formality Level

Every General Training Task 1 prompt implies a formality level through its described recipient and relationship, and the opening and closing phrases you choose are the single fastest signal to an examiner of whether you've correctly identified that level — before they've even read the letter's content, the first and last lines already tell them whether you understood who you were supposed to be writing to. This matters directly for Task Achievement, which explicitly assesses whether the letter's tone is appropriate to its purpose and recipient, and the specific mistake pattern this creates is candidates who write a perfectly well-organised, bullet-point-complete letter in an opening and closing that doesn't match the relationship described in the prompt — a mismatch that's often more noticeable to an examiner than a genuinely difficult error buried mid-paragraph, precisely because openings and closings are fixed, learnable, and checked as a specific pairing.

A formal letter — to someone you don't know personally, such as a company, a landlord you've never met, a local council, or an unnamed official — opens in one of exactly two ways, depending on whether the prompt has given you a name. If no name is given, or the prompt describes the recipient only by role ("write to the company"), the correct opening is "Dear Sir/Madam," which functions as the standard formal greeting for an unknown, unnamed recipient. If a surname is given or implied ("write to the manager, Mr Davies"), the correct opening is "Dear Mr Davies," using the title and surname, never a first name alone — a formal letter opening with "Dear James," even if James happens to be the manager's first name, undercuts the formality the situation calls for.

The closing for a formal letter is governed by a specific, testable pairing rule that IELTS examiners do check directly: if you opened with "Dear Sir/Madam" because you didn't know the recipient's name, you must close with "Yours faithfully." If you opened with a named recipient ("Dear Mr Davies"), you must close with "Yours sincerely." These two pairs are not interchangeable, and reversing them — "Dear Sir/Madam... Yours sincerely" or "Dear Mr Davies... Yours faithfully" — is a specific, nameable error that a well-prepared examiner will notice immediately, since the rule itself (sincerely pairs with a name, faithfully pairs with no name) is simple enough that getting it wrong reads as not having learned the convention at all, rather than as a minor slip.

A semi-formal letter — to someone you have a professional but personal relationship with, such as your own manager, a landlord you deal with directly and regularly, a teacher, or a colleague you know by name but wouldn't call a close friend — sits deliberately between the other two levels, and its opening reflects that: either "Dear [First Name]" or "Dear Mr/Ms [Surname]" can work here, and which one is more appropriate depends on the specific relationship the prompt describes. A tenant writing to a landlord they've met and dealt with several times might reasonably open "Dear Mr Chen," while an employee writing to a manager they work closely with day to day might open "Dear Rachel" if that's how they'd genuinely address her. The corresponding closings — "Best regards" or "Kind regards" — are warmer and less stiff than "Yours faithfully" or "Yours sincerely," but noticeably more composed than an informal sign-off, which is exactly the middle register a semi-formal letter needs to hold throughout.