OET Writing: Organising and laying-out of relevant information in OET Letter

OET Letter writing has always been a challenge to those who are not fully aware of its requirements. OET Letter writing requires you to organise relevant data selected from the case notes and to lay them out in proper paragraphs. 

If you are someone looking out for help with OET Letter writing, then this post is just for you.


OET Writing


Organization and layout are all about making your OET letter easier for the reader to comprehend. This includes adding a logical flow to the letter you write in OET and grouping the appropriate information into paragraphs. All these things will be thoroughly checked but the OET examiner hence, getting them right is crucial.

In each OET letter you write, the presentation style will vary depending on the patient's history and the recipient of the letter. The point of all this is to grab the reader's attention and present them with the information they might be the most interested in. You can identify who the reader is and what the main purpose of your OET letter is just by focusing on the writing task, given way below the OET case notes.

So let's go through a few ways in which you can put the OET letter together, with focus on how to paragraph the letter:

1) Chronologically: 

The simplest way is to present the information in OET Letter writing is in the same order of the happenings. This makes it clear and builds a mental map of the patient's history. For example the first paragraph will include the information about the first admission of Mr. X to the hospital, the second paragraph will include any incident of the history and the so in the third all in the order they have taken place. However, if the letter is being written in case of an emergency then, the incidents that have taken place 6 months ago will become irrelevant. Hence, present the information that is the most recent, first.

2) Thematically: 

The next way to organise the OET letter is to dedicate each paragraph to one specific aspect of the patients present condition. This is in case the reader will need to have a clear cut overview of the medical and social history of the patient, not necessarily in the order of the happenings. For instance, one paragraph could be on social history of the patient and the second paragraph could detail the past medical history.

Proof-read your paragraphs:
Before finishing the writing module, make sure you review your parapgraphs.
Look for paragraphs that: 
  • Discuss more than one time frame
  • Discuss more than one theme. 
If you find any, make sure to split them appropriately as there is no limit to the number of paragraphs you can include.

The order of the information being presented in the paragraph  of an OET letter is also important, thus make sure that the most important information does not get hidden inside the paragraph.

In your OET letter, present the most important information in the beginning of the paragraph. Simply including all the information in the paragraphs is not enough and getting the order wrong will lead to a poor evaluation of the task.

Happy Scoring!




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