PTE Write From Dictation: The Most Important Question Type

The dual contribution to Writing and Listening scores is what makes WFD uniquely powerful. In the PTE scoring system, each communicative skill — Speaking, Writing, Reading, and Listening — is calculated from contributions across multiple question types. WFD feeds directly into both Writing and Listening, meaning that every point you earn from WFD is effectively counted twice in your overall profile. For students who need to meet specific score thresholds for immigration or university admission, this dual contribution is a game-changer. If you are targeting a Writing score of 65 and a Listening score of 65, excelling at WFD helps you reach both targets at once. Understanding the PTE scoring system in detail, as covered in our comprehensive scoring guide, will help you appreciate just how much leverage WFD gives you.

Write From Dictation appears at the very end of the Listening section, which is the final section of the PTE Academic exam. By the time you reach WFD, you may have been testing for nearly two hours, and mental fatigue can be a real factor. This positioning makes it critical to manage your energy and concentration throughout the exam so that you arrive at WFD with enough focus to perform well. Some students make the mistake of rushing through WFD because they are tired or because they see it as just the final few questions. This is a costly error. Given its scoring weight, WFD deserves your full attention. If anything, you should conserve mental energy during less impactful sections so that you can give WFD your best effort. Knowing the full exam format helps you plan your energy management — refer to our PTE exam format guide for a complete breakdown of all sections and timing.

Each sentence in WFD is scored independently. For example, if the sentence is 'The university has implemented a new policy regarding student attendance' and your response is 'The university has implement a new policy regarding student attendance,' you would lose one point for writing 'implement' instead of 'implemented.' Every other word is correct and correctly spelled, so you would earn points for those words. Capitalization and punctuation do not affect your score in WFD — the scoring algorithm focuses solely on the words themselves. However, spelling must be accurate. Common spelling errors like writing 'goverment' instead of 'government' or 'enviroment' instead of 'environment' will cost you points. This makes spelling accuracy a critical skill to develop during your preparation. Pay particular attention to commonly misspelled academic words, as these appear frequently in WFD sentences.

Because scoring is word-by-word, you should always write something even if you cannot remember the full sentence. If you remember 7 out of 10 words, you still earn 7 points contributing to both Writing and Listening. This is very different from an all-or-nothing scoring approach. Never leave a WFD response blank — even getting three or four words right is significantly better than writing nothing. The partial credit system also means that word order matters less than you might think. While you should try to reproduce the sentence accurately, the scoring primarily checks whether each target word appears in your response with correct spelling. Getting the gist of the sentence and writing the key words you remember is a valid strategy when perfect recall fails. Focus on content words — nouns, verbs, adjectives — as these carry the most meaning and are often the words you remember most clearly.

Your WFD performance is fundamentally limited by your listening comprehension ability. If you cannot accurately hear the words in a sentence, no memory technique will help you write them down correctly. Start by assessing your listening level honestly. Can you understand English news broadcasts clearly? Can you follow academic lectures without subtitles? If not, you need to prioritize general listening improvement before focusing on WFD-specific techniques. Daily listening practice should include both extensive and intensive components. Extensive listening means consuming large amounts of English audio at a comfortable level — podcasts, audiobooks, TV shows. This builds your overall familiarity with English sounds, rhythms, and vocabulary. Intensive listening means carefully analyzing short audio clips, writing down every word, and checking your transcription against the original. Intensive listening directly mirrors the WFD task and is the most effective specific preparation you can do.

In the PTE exam, you have access to an erasable noteboard where you can jot down notes. For WFD, efficient note-taking is essential. The sentence plays once, and you must capture as many words as possible before they fade from memory. Develop a shorthand system for common words: use abbreviations, first letters, or symbols that you can quickly expand into full words when typing your response. For example, if you hear 'The government has introduced new regulations for international students,' you might quickly write 'gov intro new reg intl stu' on your noteboard. Then, when you type your response, you expand these abbreviations into full, correctly spelled words. Practice this shorthand system extensively before the exam so that it becomes automatic. The key is speed — you need to capture the key words before they disappear from your short-term memory. Another effective approach is to write the first two or three words immediately, then focus on listening to the rest of the sentence while holding it in memory. After the audio ends, write down the remaining words. This hybrid approach ensures you capture the beginning accurately while using memory for the rest.

The PTE exam draws from a bank of sentences that are periodically updated but tend to repeat within certain time windows. Many test preparation platforms maintain collections of frequently reported WFD sentences. Studying these high-frequency sentences gives you a significant advantage because you may encounter familiar sentences on exam day, making them much easier to recall. The GoPTE platform maintains an updated database of WFD sentences reported by recent test takers, categorized by frequency and difficulty. Practicing with these sentences serves a dual purpose: you learn the specific sentences that may appear, and you build general dictation skills that help with any sentence you encounter. Aim to practice at least 20 to 30 WFD sentences daily, focusing on accurate spelling and complete recall. Over the course of a month, you can work through hundreds of sentences, dramatically increasing your chances of recognizing sentences on test day.

Spelling is the silent killer of WFD scores. You might hear every word perfectly and reproduce the sentence accurately in your mind, but a single misspelling turns a correct word into zero points. The most commonly misspelled words in WFD include academic vocabulary like 'government,' 'environment,' 'assessment,' 'curriculum,' 'accommodation,' 'necessary,' 'opportunity,' and 'communication.' Create a personal spelling list of words you frequently misspell and review it regularly. Practice typing these words until correct spelling becomes muscle memory. Pay special attention to double letters (accommodation, committee, recommend), silent letters (environment, government), and common letter-swap errors (receive vs. recieve). During the exam, if you are unsure of a spelling, write your best attempt — an approximate spelling might still match the scoring algorithm's tolerance, and leaving the word out guarantees zero points for that word.

Function words — articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, at, for), conjunctions (and, but, or), and auxiliary verbs (has, have, is, are) — are easy to miss when you are focusing on capturing the main content words of a sentence. However, each function word is worth one point, just like any content word. Missing two or three articles across your WFD responses can cost you six or more points across Writing and Listening. To reduce this problem, practice listening specifically for function words. When doing dictation exercises, pay extra attention to the small connecting words between the main content words. Many students hear 'university implemented new policy' but miss 'The,' 'has,' and 'a' — losing three points unnecessarily. Training yourself to hear and reproduce these small words is one of the fastest ways to improve your WFD score.

WFD appears at the end of the exam, when fatigue and time pressure can combine to hurt performance. Some students rush through their WFD responses because they are watching the clock or because they are mentally exhausted. Others spend too long agonizing over one sentence and miss the chance to attempt the next one. Effective time management requires awareness of the exam's timing structure and discipline in allocating your attention. Before the exam, practice completing WFD items within realistic time constraints. Each item gives you a fixed time window to type your response, so you cannot take unlimited time. Get comfortable with the typing interface and practice typing accurately at speed. If you are a slow typist, consider taking a typing speed course as part of your exam preparation. Being able to type quickly and accurately reduces the chance that you will forget words while struggling to get them onto the screen.

In weeks one and two, focus on building foundational listening and dictation skills. Practice with short, simple sentences of 5 to 7 words. Listen to each sentence twice — once to understand, once to write — then check your accuracy. This builds confidence and establishes the habit of careful listening. Also begin building your spelling accuracy by studying commonly misspelled academic words. In weeks three and four, increase sentence length to 8 to 12 words and switch to single-play practice — listen only once before writing, just as in the actual exam. Introduce your shorthand note-taking system and practice expanding abbreviations into full words. Begin working through the GoPTE high-frequency sentence bank, aiming for 20 to 30 sentences per day. By the end of week four, you should be accurately reproducing 80 percent or more of the words in most sentences. In the final week before your exam, focus on simulating exam conditions. Practice WFD items after completing a full mock listening section to build endurance. Review your most commonly missed words and sentence patterns. Ensure your typing speed is adequate and your spelling is reliable. This final-week polish can make the difference between a good score and a great one.

WFD does not exist in isolation — it is part of the broader PTE Listening section, which also includes Summarize Spoken Text, multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks, highlight correct summary, highlight incorrect words, and select missing word. Your overall Listening score depends on performance across all these tasks, and many of the skills that help with WFD also help with other listening tasks. For example, the intensive listening skills you develop for WFD directly improve your performance on Highlight Incorrect Words and Listening Fill in the Blanks. The vocabulary you build for spelling accuracy helps with Reading Fill in the Blanks as well. Take a holistic approach to your PTE preparation, recognizing that improvements in one area often cascade into others. For strategies on related speaking tasks that also contribute to listening scores, see our Repeat Sentence strategies guide.