TCF Canada's Expression écrite Tâche 1 asks for a short message — an invitation, some information, or a request — of 60 to 120 words, addressed to a specific recipient named in the prompt: a friend, a colleague, a director, a landlord. The single biggest scoring lever on this task is register. If the prompt names a friend or a family member, you write in tu; if it names someone you don't know personally — a director, an organization, an administration — you write in vous. Getting this wrong (tutoyer-ing a Directrice, or vouvoyer-ing your best friend) reads as a fluency failure even when the vocabulary is otherwise fine, so pick your track from the addressee before you write a word.
Whichever register the prompt calls for, a strong Tâche 1 message follows the same shape: an opening that names your addressee, a line stating why you're writing, the invitation or request itself, a line asking your addressee to confirm or respond, and a closing. This lesson gives you both tracks for every stage of that shape:
| Hi Marie! (informal opening) | Salut Marie ! |
| Hello Ms. Dupont, (formal opening) | Bonjour Madame Dupont, |
Notice how the two tracks diverge. The informal opener above uses a first name and no title; the formal one uses a courtesy title and a surname or a job title alone ("Madame la Directrice,"). That split carries through the whole message — informal requests lean on tu-questions and bare imperatives ("Peux-tu...?", "Dis-moi..."), while formal requests lean on conditional politeness ("Je vous saurais gré de..."), and closings run from a first-name sign-off ("À bientôt", "Bisous") on the informal side to the fixed courtesy formulas ("Cordialement", or the full "Veuillez agréer..." closing taught in Lesson 15) on the formal side. Mixing tracks inside one message — a warm tu opening followed by a vous closing, or the reverse — is one of the most commonly flagged Tâche 1 errors: hold your register from the first word to the last, including the confirmation-request line.
Budget your 60–120 words across all five beats rather than spending them all on the invitation itself — examiners are checking for the complete shape of a message, not just the ask.
