OET Writing: Filtering the Content

Content, in the OET writing subtest, is the information that you will be representing in the letter that you will be tasked with. It is also the second marking criteria that judges how well you have selected the most useful information in the letter and conveyed them in a reasonable order.

Let's see how you can filter out the useful and relevant information from the case notes in OET WRITING!

All the content that you will need will be present in the case notes but not all the case notes will be important or relevant to the reader. Thus, you will need to figure out what information to select and present from the case notes.

The Decision:

The dilemma of what to select is quite simple to solve. All you have to do is select the information that will help the reader continue his or her care for the patient and also fulfil any extra needs that you put forward.

Now here are a few things to remember while doing this:

• Do the patient and the reader have any prior relations
• What exactly will the reader be doing once he has the patient
• Any information that might be new and useful to the reader.

To put it in a nutshell, the reader has to have a clear understanding of the situation and no further questions after reading your letter. If he fails to meet any of the two, then you have made a mistake somewhere.

Accurate representation:

The odds are that we all have made mistakes in representing the information that is provided to us in the case notes. Let's see how we can mitigate these errors.

• Using words that are not the same as the ones we are trying to paraphrase.
• Using the wrong tense and conveying the wrong time frame
  

Let's look at an example,

• Case notes: Pt moving to Medford to live with daughter & her husband.
• Letter: Mr Y is relocating to Medford to be nearer his daughter and son-in-law.

Here the meaning is technically the same but context changes entirely. Living with and nearer to his daughter are 2 very different things.

Make sure you do not mix up the tense of the case notes and use synonyms that are accurate and with adequate colliquative measure.

Happy Scoring!