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TOEFL Writing practice
All three tasks of the January 2026 section — ten Build a Sentence items, an email and an academic discussion post — on the real clock, marked criterion by criterion.
Format checked against ETS on .
The section we run
Twelve items, 23 minutes, twenty raw points. This is the Writing section ETS has set since 21 January 2026. Integrated Writing — a passage, a lecture that contradicts it, and twenty minutes to explain the conflict — was retired with the old paper, and a tool still drilling it is drilling a task nobody sits.
All three writing task types
- Build a Sentence — five to seven tiles, one correct order. Ten items, one point each, so half the section's marks.
- Write an Email — a situation and a short reply to it. One item, five points.
- Writing for an Academic Discussion — a professor's question and two student replies, and a reasoned contribution of your own. One item, five points. The one task that survived the redesign unchanged.
Half the marks go to the fastest thing on the test
Build a Sentence is ten of the twelve items and ten of the twenty points. A tile is a word or a short phrase that has to move as a unit, and exactly one arrangement of them is a grammatical sentence. There is no rubric and no judgement: it is right or it is not.
No tile is ever repeated in an item. Two identical tiles in different positions cannot be told apart, so a candidate could be marked wrong for an order that reads identically to the right one — the generator refuses those before they are banked.
The clock is a split of ETS's, said out loud
ETS publishes 23 minutes for the section and no clock for each task. Ours divides that by marks: about eleven and a half minutes across the ten Build a Sentence items, and under six for each written task. The three add up to 23 exactly.
By items instead of marks the split would give nineteen minutes to the quickest task in the section and two to each essay, which is plainly wrong. Every other clock in this product is a board's number; this one is ours, and it is derived rather than invented.
Writing is linear, so a fixed form is the delivery
Reading and Listening adapt on the day and our fixed-form rehearsal of them is an approximation. Writing is not adaptive: ETS states that every candidate on a form receives the same set of tasks. Twelve items in this order, on this clock, is how the real section runs.
Marked with the sentence that earned the remark
The email and the discussion post are marked criterion by criterion against the published descriptors, and the feedback quotes your own sentences back — so a remark about development points at the paragraph that was thin, rather than arriving as a number you have to interpret.
Questions, answered
What are the TOEFL Writing tasks in 2026?
Three, and twelve items between them. Build a Sentence is ten items: you are given a handful of tiles and you order them into one correct sentence. Write an Email is one short reply to a situation. Writing for an Academic Discussion is one post into an online class thread. The whole section is 23 minutes and twenty raw points, split ten for Build a Sentence and five for each of the written tasks.
What is TOEFL Build a Sentence?
Five to seven tiles — a word or a short phrase each — that make exactly one grammatical sentence when put in the right order. Ten of them, machine marked against a key, one point each. It is half the Writing section's marks and it is the fastest thing in the whole test: no tile is ever repeated, because two identical tiles in different positions cannot be told apart.
How long is TOEFL Writing?
23 minutes for the whole section. ETS does not publish a clock for each task, so ours splits the section by marks rather than by items: about 11 and a half minutes across the ten Build a Sentence items, and under six for each written task. The three add up to ETS's 23 exactly, which is what makes it a split of their number rather than three plausible guesses.
How is TOEFL Writing marked here?
Build a Sentence is marked against a key — there is a right order and no judgement in it. The email and the discussion post are marked criterion by criterion against the published descriptors, with your own sentences quoted back so you can see which sentence earned which remark rather than being handed a bare number.
Is this the current TOEFL Writing format?
Yes. ETS redesigned the TOEFL iBT on 21 January 2026 and this is the redesigned Writing section. Integrated Writing — a passage, a lecture that contradicts it, and twenty minutes to explain the conflict — was retired with the old paper and is not in it. Each section is now reported as a 1 to 6 band, with a comparable 0 to 120 total until January 2028.
Free to start — four writing and four speaking evaluations a month, no card.
The rest of the paper
TOEFL Reading, Listening and Speaking have their own pages, and the full TOEFL practice test covers all four. Work out a total on the TOEFL score calculator.