How to Plan an OET Letter in the First 5 Minutes

Most OET Writing candidates lose time in the wrong place. They read the case notes once, start writing immediately, and then stall halfway through the second paragraph because they can’t remember which detail belongs where — so they re-read the notes a second time, mid-letter, under worse time pressure than before. Planning an OET letter in the first five minutes is the fix: a short, fixed sequence of steps that turns a page of clinical notes into a paragraph-by-paragraph list before a single full sentence gets written.

Why does planning matter for your OET Writing band?

The OET Writing sub-test is marked against six official criteria set by CBLA: Purpose, Content, Conciseness & Clarity, Genre & Style, Organisation & Layout, and Language. Two of these — Content (0-7) and Organisation & Layout (0-7) — are decided almost entirely by what happens before you write your first sentence, not during the sentence-level drafting itself.

Content is marked on whether you included the information the letter needs and left out what it doesn’t. That decision is made the moment you choose which case-note details to carry into the letter — a choice that happens during planning whether you plan deliberately or not. Organisation & Layout is marked on whether the letter has a clear, logical structure with appropriate paragraphing. That too is a planning decision: a letter written paragraph-by-paragraph as the case notes are read, with no prior grouping, tends to produce either one long unbroken paragraph or paragraph breaks that don’t correspond to any logical shift in topic.

Skipping planning doesn’t remove this decision-making — it just moves it to happen reactively, sentence by sentence, under time pressure, which is a worse context for making it well.

How do you plan an OET letter in 5 minutes?

Four steps, in this order, each with a fixed time budget:

1. Identify purpose and recipient (60 seconds). Read the task instructions, not the case notes, first. Confirm the letter type — referral, discharge, transfer, or advice — and who it’s addressed to. A referral to a specialist assumes less shared context than a discharge letter to a GP who already knows the patient; this changes what counts as necessary background versus what can be left out entirely.
2. Scan and mark the case notes (90 seconds). Read through the notes once, with a pen, marking every point that’s relevant to the purpose you just identified and crossing out anything that isn’t. Don’t write sentences yet — just mark. This is the step most candidates do too slowly because they try to compose wording in their head while reading, which doubles the time it takes.
3. Group marked points into paragraphs (90 seconds). Sort the marked points into 3-4 groups, each one a future paragraph, in the order the reader needs them — typically: why you’re writing, relevant history, current status, and the specific request or recommendation. Jot each group as 3-5 keywords, not full clauses.
4. Check the plan against the word count (30 seconds). OET letters run 180-200 words. If your four paragraph-groups list 20+ keywords each, you’re planning to over-write; if two paragraphs have one keyword each, you’re under-selecting content. Adjust the grouping now, while it costs nothing, rather than discovering the imbalance mid-draft.

That’s five minutes. The remaining 35-38 minutes go to writing full sentences from the plan, and the last 2-3 minutes to a focused proofread rather than a first read of what you wrote.

What should you identify first — purpose or content?

Purpose, always. The purpose of the letter determines which case-note details count as content in the first place, so identifying content before purpose means re-deciding relevance twice. A letter requesting a specialist review and a letter summarising a discharge for a GP can be built from an identical set of case notes and still need almost entirely different content, because what the first reader needs to act on and what the second reader needs to continue care are not the same information.

This is also why re-reading the task instructions carefully in step one matters more than most candidates expect under time pressure: the instructions typically name the recipient and often state explicitly what the letter should achieve, and that single sentence should steer every content decision that follows it.

How many paragraphs should your plan have, and in what order?

Three to four, for the overwhelming majority of OET letter types, following a sequence built around the reader’s information need rather than the chronology of the case notes:

A short letter sometimes collapses the middle two into a single paragraph; a dense case rarely needs more than four. Our letter templates guide covers these four structures in more depth for referral, discharge, transfer, and advice letters specifically, including which one tends to need the history paragraph split in two.

What are the most common planning mistakes?

Three mistakes account for most of the Content and Organisation & Layout marks lost to planning, specifically, rather than to writing quality:

1. Planning in case-note order instead of reader order. Case notes are a chronological clinical record, not a letter outline. Copying their sequence straight into your paragraph plan routinely buries the reason for writing — the single most important sentence in the letter — under background the reader doesn’t need first.
2. Writing full sentences during the planning phase. The plan is keywords, not prose. A candidate who starts composing wording while scanning the case notes in step two almost always runs out of the 90-second budget before finishing the scan, which pushes the overrun into steps three and four and compresses them until they disappear.
3. Not checking the plan against the word target. Skipping step four means discovering the content imbalance for the first time while writing paragraph three, at which point fixing it costs real drafting time instead of the 30 seconds it would have cost during planning.

Reading the case notes efficiently in the first place also shortens step two considerably — our guide to reading OET case notes quickly and accurately covers how to extract the dates, values, and key events a plan needs without re-reading the notes twice.

How does planning fit into the full 45 minutes?

Planning is the first five minutes of a timed sequence, not an activity separate from time management. Our guide to using the full 45 minutes breaks down how the remaining time should split between drafting and proofreading once the plan is in hand, and why candidates who try to “make up” planning time by writing faster in the drafting phase tend to lose more marks than they would have lost to a slightly rushed final proofread.

Where self-editing hits its limit

A good plan controls Content and Organisation & Layout, but it can’t catch everything a finished letter is marked on — register, grammar, and sentence-level clarity are decided during and after drafting, and a candidate reading their own letter back tends to see what they meant to write rather than what’s actually on the page. The free exam-day checklist is a useful companion to a planning routine for exactly this reason: it catches structural gaps a rushed self-read misses. For a full review against all six criteria together, our OET writing correction service has corrected more than 11,000 OET letters since 2014, checking not just whether a letter is well-planned but whether every criterion examiners mark is covered. If you’re deciding how much support to book, our pricing page lays out pack sizes from a single letter review up to full exam preparation.