The most common source of lost marks in OET Writing is inappropriate register: language that is too formal for a professional-to-professional letter, too informal for a clinical document, or — most often — inconsistent, shifting between the two within the same letter. Register is one of the explicitly assessed criteria, not a stylistic afterthought, and it can be trained systematically.
What "Register" Means in OET Writing
The OET Writing sub-test asks you to write a letter — commonly a referral, discharge, or transfer letter — based on case notes, addressed to a specific named recipient such as a general practitioner, a specialist, or another healthcare professional. Register refers to the level of formality and the tone appropriate to that specific reader and that specific purpose.
This is genuinely a different skill from general accuracy. You can construct grammatically correct sentences that are still wrong for the task, because they read like a casual conversation, an overly technical case-note fragment copied verbatim, or a mixture of both within the same paragraph. Assessors are trained to notice this inconsistency even when every individual sentence is otherwise well formed.
Too Formal, Too Informal, and the Middle Ground
Both extremes cost marks, but for different reasons:
- Overly formal or stilted language — dense, bureaucratic phrasing, or unnecessarily complex sentence structures — can obscure the clinical information the recipient actually needs, and it rarely matches how healthcare professionals genuinely write to one another.
- Overly informal language — contractions, conversational fillers, colloquial expressions, or an unexplained tone of familiarity — undermines the professional credibility of the letter and can read as careless given the clinical content being conveyed.
- The appropriate middle ground is a professional, courteous, and direct register: full sentences without stiffness, clear and specific clinical detail, and a tone a genuine colleague would use when writing to another colleague they respect but do not know personally.
