The writing mistakes that cap your TCF/TEF Canada score

The mistakes that cap a TCF or TEF Canada writing score are not the ones most candidates worry about. Ask someone what they are afraid of and they will name grammar: a wrong agreement, a subjunctive that should have been there, a tense that slipped. Those cost marks, but they are rarely what holds a script in the middle bands. The expensive errors are the ones that damage a whole answer at once, and a marker meets most of them in the first two sentences.

A useful way to rank writing mistakes is by footprint: how much of your text each one spoils. A grammar slip damages one word. Writing to the wrong reader, or answering the theme instead of the task, damages everything after it. So the list below runs from widest to narrowest, which is also the order you should fix them in.

Which mistake costs the most marks?

Answering the theme instead of the task. The TCF instruction always tells you who you are, who you are writing to, why, and in what form; France Éducation international treats an off-topic production as one of six conditions that can send an entire script to A1 non atteint, below the first rung of the scale. The classic version is not wild: you are asked to write to your building manager about construction noise and to request a change of hours, and you produce a fluent general piece about noise pollution in cities. Every sentence is correct. No sentence does the task, because there is no named reader, no purpose and no situation.

The fix takes thirty seconds and it is the cheapest insurance in the paper. Before writing a word, note four lines on the rough sheet: who is writing, to whom, for what purpose, in what form. If any line is blank when you finish, you are about to answer the theme.

Why does register cap so many scripts?

Because it colours the whole task and it is judged on purpose. The instruction hands you the reader's status, which means the exam has told you whether to use tu or vous before you write anything. A candidate who opens a letter to a director with Salut, or slips one tu into an otherwise formal complaint, has not made a small error in one place. They have shown a marker that they cannot read a social situation, and a francophone reader sees it from a metre away.

This is a whole topic of its own, and worth reading separately, because the same trap sits under the speaking tasks. The short rule: pick tu or vous from the reader's status, then hold it through the greeting, the body and the sign-off without a single lapse.

What are the mistakes that hide inside good French?

These are the ones confident writers make, because they only appear once you stop writing simple sentences.

• Rephrasing the prompt. On the TEF Section A the marker has the opening paragraph in front of them; on the TCF Task 3 they have the two source documents. Repeating that material in fresh words adds nothing, and copying a sentence outright is another of the six conditions that can void a TCF script. The habit that beats it: read the source, turn the sheet over, write the idea from memory.
• Filler connectors. A text sprinkled with de plus, en outre and par ailleurs reads as a list, not an argument. Each one only announces that something is being added, which the reader had already guessed.
• Retreating to safe sentences. When your error count rises, the instinct is to shorten. It is the wrong instinct. The marking criteria reward range as well as accuracy, and a clean text with no ambition sits in the middle bands. A candidate who attempts a concession and makes a slip generally outscores one who never risks the structure.
• Losing control of the past tenses. Starting a narrative in the passé composé and drifting into the present by the second paragraph is one of the most visible faults in Task 2, and it is a favourite way to lose reader trust across a whole answer.

Do spelling and grammar mistakes really matter less?

Less than the errors above, but not little, and here the two exams agree on something candidates get backwards. The CEFR defines B2 accuracy as making no mistakes that lead to misunderstanding, with occasional slips and non-systematic errors expressly allowed. Chasing a zero-error script is optimising for a bar that does not exist, at the cost of the range and organisation that do. A wrong agreement a reader glides past costs far less than a paragraph with no plan.

That said, on the TEF, spelling and punctuation are a named line of the published grid, not a tolerance, and they are the cheapest marks in the paper because correcting an agreement needs no new French, only five minutes and a method. Two error families are worth hunting first, because a francophone eye catches them instantly: verb-subject agreement when the subject is far from its verb, and the confusion between an -é participle and an -er infinitive. For the second, mentally swap in vendre: if vendre fits, write the infinitive; if vendu fits, write the participle.

How do you stop making these mistakes?

Not by rereading your own work, because the fault you cannot see is the one you will not catch. You can plan against the wide errors on your own: the four-line reader note kills off-task and register, and a plan written as words rather than sentences keeps Task 3 comparing instead of summarising. But whether the range you think you produced is actually on the page is not something rereading tells you. That needs a second pair of eyes on marked output.

Two pages are worth having open while you practise: the TCF expression écrite guide, which lists the six conditions that void a script, and the TEF expression écrite guide, which quotes the published criteria for each section. If your target is the CLB 7 band, note that it lines up with the upper part of B2, which is a real level but a long way below the top of the exam, so you are not being asked for a flawless text. You are being asked for a clear, organised one that stays on task, and the fastest way to get there is to have your writing marked in the TCF Canada course rather than to keep marking it yourself.