Why this task feels unfamiliar
Because you have almost certainly never written one for an exam. B2 First offers an article, an email or letter, a report and a review as its Part 2 options. The proposal is not among them. It appears for the first time at C1 Advanced, which is why candidates who passed FCE comfortably often meet it cold.
The instinct most people bring is to write a report, because reports are familiar and the two look alike on the page — both formal, both with headings, both ending in recommendations. That instinct is the single biggest source of lost marks on this task.
Proposal, report, review, letter — telling them apart
The tense gives it away. A report looks backwards at a situation that exists and draws conclusions from it. A proposal looks forwards to something that does not exist yet and argues that it should. Same formality, opposite direction of travel.
| Task | Reader | Direction | Ends with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proposal | Someone who can approve it — a principal, a manager, a committee | Forward: what should happen | Recommendations plus the benefits of adopting them |
| Report | Someone who asked for the findings | Backward: what is the case now | Conclusions drawn from the findings |
| Review | A reader deciding whether to watch, read, visit or buy | Evaluative: how good was it | A verdict and a recommendation for whom |
| Letter / email | A named individual or organisation | Transactional: what you want from them | A clear request, complaint or response |
Read the task wording for the giveaway verbs. “Write a proposal suggesting…”, “persuading the committee to…”, “outlining what should be done” — all forward-looking. If the task says describing what happened or summarising the results, you are being asked for a report.
Structure
Headings are conventional here and they hand you Organisation marks almost for free. Three or four is right for this length — more and each section is too thin to develop anything.
- Introduction / Purpose — one or two sentences saying what the proposal covers and why it is being written. Not a paragraph.
- Current situation — the shortest section. Enough context to make the recommendations make sense, and no more. Two or three sentences.
- Recommendations — the heart of it. What you propose, in specific terms.
- Benefits / Conclusion — what the reader’s organisation gains if they say yes. This is the section candidates skip, and it is what makes a proposal persuasive rather than merely descriptive.
Register and headings
Fully formal, and consistently so across the whole piece — consistency is assessed under Communicative Achievement, and it is harder to maintain over 260 words than over 160. No contractions, no conversational asides, no rhetorical questions to the reader.
Headings should be plain nouns or noun phrases — Introduction, Current provision, Recommendations, Anticipated benefits. Full sentences as headings read as informal, and questions as headings (“What should we do?”) belong in an article, not here.
Address the reader as an institution rather than a person you know. “I would recommend that the committee consider…” rather than “I think you should…”.
C
Content
Did you do everything the task asked?
CA
Communicative Achievement
The right register and effect for the reader
O
Organisation
Paragraphs, linking, a logical shape
L
Language
Range and accuracy of vocabulary and grammar
Language for recommending and justifying
The task turns on a narrow band of functional language, which makes it one of the more learnable Part 2 options once you have the phrases.
Recommending, with a range of force
- Strong: I would strongly urge the school to…, it is essential that…
- Neutral: it would be advisable to…, I would suggest…, a further option would be to…
- Tentative: it might be worth considering…, one possibility would be…
Varying the force across your recommendations is worth doing — three identically-phrased suggestions read as a list, while a strong primary recommendation followed by a tentative secondary one reads as judgement.
Justifying
Every recommendation needs a because. The structures that do this well at C1 are the ones that link an action to an outcome: this would allow students to…, the principal advantage of this approach is that…, doing so would substantially reduce…. Note the conditional — you are describing a world that does not exist yet, so would runs through the whole recommendations section.
A cleft sentence earns its keep in the benefits section: “What this would achieve, above all, is…”.
Where candidates lose marks
- Describing instead of recommending. Half the answer spent on the current situation, with recommendations tacked on at the end. The commonest failure on this task by some distance.
- Recommendations without benefits. Saying what should happen but never what the reader gains. A proposal that does not persuade has not done its job, whatever its grammar.
- Vagueness. “Improve the facilities” is not a recommendation; “extend opening hours into the evening and add a second study room” is. Specifics are what make a proposal approvable.
- Missing a required content point. Part 2 tasks bury two or three things you must address inside a short prompt. Underline them before you plan.
- Register slipping. Formal opening, chatty middle. The longer piece makes this easier to do and easier for an examiner to spot.
Practising it
The proposal rewards practice more than most Part 2 options, precisely because it is unfamiliar — the structure and the recommending language are learnable, and once they are automatic the task becomes one of the more predictable choices on the paper.
Write one and have it marked: C1 Advanced proposal practice scores your answer against Content, Communicative Achievement, Organisation and Language with sentence-level comments. The other Part 2 options are covered in report, review and formal letter, and the common C1 writing mistakes include the two that hit proposals hardest. If Part 1 is also on your list, the C1 Advanced essay guide covers the compulsory task, and the C1 Advanced exam preparation guide puts the Writing paper in context against the other three.