Writing is now around 12 items in about 23 minutes across three tasks, and two of them did not exist before 2026. The integrated read-listen-summarise task is gone.
Build a Sentence. Controlled items testing structure directly. This is the first time TOEFL has marked grammar as its own task rather than inside an essay, and it is good news: grammar is the most improvable thing on the test.
- Find the main verb first, then the subject it belongs to. Most errors are agreement errors.
- Watch word order in questions and subordinate clauses, which is where Indian-English habits most often diverge from the expected form.
- Check tense consistency across the sentence, not just within a clause.
Fifteen minutes of sentence-level grammar a day for three weeks moves this task more than any amount of essay practice would.
Write an Email. A functional task with a purpose, a reader and a register.
- Open properly. A professor is not a classmate. *Dear Professor Rao* against *Hi Anjali*.
- State the purpose in the first sentence. *I am writing to ask whether…*
- Do the things the prompt asked for — count them, and tick them off.
- Close in the register you opened in.
The commonest failure is register drift: a formal opening followed by a casual body.
Write for an Academic Discussion. The one task carried over. A professor's question, two students' posts already on the board, and your contribution.
- Engage — name a student and what they said. *Rahul's point about cost is fair, but it assumes…*
- Position — your own view, plainly.
- Support — a reason and one concrete example.
- Extend — a condition, a consequence, a case where it would not hold.
Around 100 to 150 words. It is marked as a contribution to a discussion, so a well-written essay that ignores the two students reads as if you never looked at the thread.