Speaking Part 2 · Media & abstractIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Message You Sent That Never Got a Reply
In short
“Describe a Message You Sent That Never Got a Reply” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Message You Sent That Never Got a Reply. You should say:
- •Who you sent it to
- •What it was about
- •How you sent it
- •And explain how you felt when there was no reply
Band 9 model answer
The message I'll describe was an email I sent about two years ago to a teacher I'd had at fifteen, who I'd not been in contact with for well over a decade and who never replied.
What it was about was fairly simple and, I realise now, quite a lot to receive out of nowhere. I'd been having a conversation with a colleague about why I'd ended up doing what I do, and I traced it back to a single afternoon in that teacher's class where he'd kept me back and told me, with more directness than anyone had used with me before, that I was coasting and that he found it irritating to watch. It was not a kind conversation. It was completely correct, and it changed how I worked from about that week onwards. So I found his school email through the school's website and wrote about four hundred words telling him.
I sent it as an email deliberately, having thought about it. It felt like the right register — not intrusive, no reply demanded, something he could read whenever. I remember consciously ending it by saying he needn't respond.
And he didn't. I checked, in a way I'm slightly embarrassed about, fairly often for about three weeks, then occasionally for a few months, and then stopped.
How I felt went through a stage I hadn't anticipated. The first reaction was straightforwardly deflated, and then it curdled into something worse — I started constructing explanations. He didn't remember me. He thought it was strange. The address was wrong. That went on for a couple of weeks and none of it was based on anything.
What I settled on eventually was that I'd made a small error about what the message was for. I'd told myself it was for him, and the disappointment was evidence that some part of it had been for me — I'd wanted the loop closed, and an unanswered message leaves it open. Once I'd worked that out I was genuinely fine about it. The point of the message was that he should know, and if he read it, he knows. Whether I got to hear him say so was never really the substance.
I'd still send it. If anything the fact that it wasn't answered has made it a better example of the thing, because it forced me to be honest about why I'd written it.
Make it your own: three angles
A message of thanks to someone from your past
The richest option — the silence is not rejection, so the fourth bullet becomes genuinely reflective rather than a complaint.
A job application or formal enquiry
Very common and easy to describe, and it leads straight into the Part 3 questions about communication etiquette.
A message to a friend you had lost touch with
Emotionally direct. Handle it generously — an answer that reads as a grievance about someone tends to score worse than a reflective one.
What the examiner is listening for
The fourth bullet is the card, and a candidate who simply reports annoyance runs dry in a minute. Silence is ambiguous, so use the language of speculation — 'he may well have…', 'I suppose it's possible that…', 'I'd assumed, wrongly, that…'. That is Part 3 language arriving early, and it is precisely what an examiner is listening for.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- How do you usually contact your friends?
- Do you reply to messages quickly?
- Do you prefer texting or phoning?
- Have you ever written a letter by hand?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people not reply to messages?
Far less often than we assume because of anything to do with the sender. Most unanswered messages are ones that arrived at a bad moment, got mentally filed as needing a proper reply, and then aged past the point where replying felt easy. There's a threshold effect — after about a week, answering requires an apology, and that's enough to stop a lot of people entirely.
Is it rude not to reply?
It depends on what was asked. Ignoring a direct question or a request costs the other person something, and that's genuinely inconsiderate. A message that needs no answer is different. I'd say the real change is volume — people now receive far more messages than anyone could answer, so non-reply has shifted from a statement to a simple consequence of arithmetic.
How has communication changed in the last twenty years?
It's become instant, constant and much less formal. The expectation of a rapid answer is the biggest shift — a letter could take a week without anyone thinking twice, and now a few hours' silence gets interpreted. It's also become largely written, which is efficient and strips out tone, so a great deal of mild offence is taken over things nobody meant.
Do people write fewer letters now?
Almost none, personally, and it's worth noticing what went with it. A letter required time and had to be worth the effort of writing and posting, so it tended to contain something. Messages are cheap, so they carry less individually even though there are vastly more of them. What's also disappeared is the archive — people used to have boxes of correspondence, and very few will have anything equivalent.
Should people be expected to reply immediately?
No, and the expectation has become quietly corrosive. It puts everyone permanently on call and makes considered replies harder, since speed is rewarded over content. Some of the healthiest workplaces I know of have explicitly set a slower norm, which only works if it's a stated rule — otherwise the fastest responder sets the standard for everyone.
Is it better to say something important in person or in writing?
In person for anything with feeling attached, because tone carries the meaning and text reliably loses it — the number of arguments caused by a misread message is evidence enough. Writing wins where precision matters, or where the other person needs time to absorb it without having to respond immediately. So: difficult things in person, complicated things in writing.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to get no reply | to receive no response |
| to be left on read | to have a message seen but not answered |
| to reach out to someone | to make contact with them |
| to lose touch | to stop communicating |
| to follow up | to send a further message about something |
| to read too much into something | to find meaning that is not there |
| out of the blue | unexpectedly, with no warning |
| to close the loop | to finish an unresolved exchange |
| deflated | disappointed and low in spirits |
| a register | the level of formality of language |
More cue cards
Describe a Person Who Taught You Something
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