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Most people prepare for skriftlig fremstilling as if the goal were to write Danish without errors. The official assessment guide that examiners actually work from tells a different story. It sorts your errors by one question: how much repair work do they force on the reader?
That single idea reorders everything. Some errors you worry about are almost free. Some habits you have never thought about are expensive. And the two most costly mistakes in the whole exam are not language mistakes at all — they are decisions about which task you answer and when you stop writing.
Here are the recurring mistakes, ranked by what they genuinely cost you.
How the written part is actually marked
Skriftlig fremstilling has two parts, and you get one combined grade for both.
Delprøve 1 is a semi-formal message — a complaint, an application, a recommendation, a thank-you note, a notice or an invitation. You are given two options, 1A and 1B, and you pick one. The task describes a situation and lists the points your text has to cover.
Delprøve 2 is an informal e-mail answering a friend who wants to hear about something in your life. It asks for at least 100 words.
The two parts do not carry equal weight. Delprøve 2 is described as afgørende for den endelige karakter — decisive for the final grade. Delprøve 1 works mainly as a tie-breaker: when examiners are caught between two grades, a strong delprøve 1 argues for the higher one and a weak one pulls toward the lower.
Everything below follows from that asymmetry.
1. Not finishing delprøve 2 — the only mistake that makes passing impossible
This is the most expensive thing you can do, and it is entirely avoidable.
If you hand in delprøve 1 but not delprøve 2, the guide is blunt: only the grades 00 or -3 can be given. Not a low pass. No pass at all. It does not matter how good your formal letter was — a missing delprøve 2 closes the door.
What to do about it: decide in advance that delprøve 2 gets written, complete, no matter what else happens. If you are running out of time, an unpolished finished e-mail beats a beautiful half-finished one every time.
2. Skipping delprøve 1 — one grade, gone before anyone reads a word
The mirror image is cheaper, but still costly. If you answer only delprøve 2, the guide applies et fradrag på én karakter — a one-grade deduction, taken up front, before your writing is even assessed. In practice the top grade becomes unreachable.
Notice what this means: a rushed, ordinary delprøve 1 is worth far more than no delprøve 1 at all. Perfectionism on the formal message is what causes candidates to run out of time — and the deduction for skipping it is fixed, whatever the reason.
What to do about it: write both. Give delprøve 1 a firm time limit and stick to it.
3. Answering both 1A and 1B — your better answer gets thrown away
This one surprises people, because it feels like being thorough.
Writing both options carries no penalty in itself. But only your first answer is marked. The guide is explicit that the second one ses altid bort fra — is always disregarded. The exam requirement is considered met by the first attempt.
So if you write 1A, feel dissatisfied, and write 1B as a better second try, the better text is never read. You have spent the time twice and been marked on your weaker attempt.
What to do about it: read both options, choose within the first minute, and commit. If you genuinely change your mind, cross out the abandoned version clearly rather than leaving two finished texts.
4. Leaving one of the task's points untouched
Both delprøver list the points your text must cover. Missing one costs you a deduction — small, but reliable, and easy to avoid.
The useful detail is how flexible the rest is. Examiners explicitly accept an answer where one point is developed at length and another is only briefly mentioned. You do not have to give each point equal space, and you do not need to give an opinion or an evaluation unless the task asks for one. What you cannot do is stay silent on a point.
Note that the number of points is not the same every time. Count them on the day rather than assuming.
What to do about it: before you start writing, number the points in the margin. Before you hand in, check each one off in your text.
5. Errors that make the reader repair your meaning
Now to the language itself — and to the principle that decides where you land.
Every grade band in the assessment criteria has a reparation line, and it is the clearest ladder in the whole document:
- At the top: "De få sproglige mangler er ikke hæmmende for forståeligheden." The few language weaknesses do not obstruct understanding.
- In the middle: "De sproglige mangler hæmmer kun i mindre grad forståeligheden, og kan repareres på baggrund af konteksten." They obstruct only slightly, and context repairs them.
- At the pass line: "manglerne medfører megen reparation, men fører sjældent til kommunikative sammenbrud." Much repair, but rarely a communicative breakdown.
Below that line sits the breakdown itself. So the question is never "is this correct Danish?" — it is "can my reader recover what I meant without effort?"
The errors that fail that test, in the examiners' own written assessments, are:
- Dropped sentence elements. Leaving out a subject or a verb is singled out as "hvilket forstyrrer læsningen" — it disturbs the reading. This is the single most damaging habit.
- Missing punctuation. One assessment notes a text where "der ses kun et enkelt punktum" — only one full stop. Without sentence boundaries the reader has to guess where each thought ends.
- An unclear purpose or recipient. If the examiner cannot tell whether you are complaining or asking a question, the text fails at the level that matters most.
- Missing connectors. Texts are criticised for jumping between topics with no sammenhængsmarkører to link them.
- Word order in statements that do not begin with the subject. Danish puts the verb second, so "I går gik jeg…", not "I går jeg gik…". Research on learners of Danish found roughly a quarter of such sentences carry the wrong order — and examiners note "uforbundne hovedsætninger uden inversion" directly.
- Long stretches of attempted direct speech. One assessment calls this "særligt hæmmende for forståeligheden". Report what was said instead of staging it.
What to do about it: short sentences, full stops, one point per paragraph. It is unglamorous and it moves you up a band.
6. The mistakes that cost least — and get the most study time
This is where a lot of preparation is misdirected.
Endings and gender. At the pass band, examiners record a text with "en del morfologiske fejl" and immediately add "men de forstyrrer ikke læsningen" — they do not disturb the reading. En for et is worth fixing, but it is not what stands between you and the next grade.
Greetings and sign-offs. There is no explicit requirement that the e-mail opens and closes appropriately. Examiners are told to focus on whether you wrote about what the instruction asked. The polite formulas you have drilled are pleasant, not load-bearing.
Hitting the word count exactly. The minimum is a rettesnor — a guideline for you. Examiners do not count your words, and only a serious deviation counts against you. Padding a thin answer with filler to reach a number makes the text harder to read and gains you nothing. Cover the points properly and the length arrives by itself.
Vocabulary you are not sure of. A precise word you cannot spell costs more than a plain word you can. Everyday topics are the point of this exam.
One genuine caveat: this is a language test, not a knowledge test — "der vurderes på sprog, ikke på viden". But if you know so little about the situation that your text could not function in real life, that does reach the grade. Write about what you actually know.
Your last five minutes
Read your text once and check only these:
- Is delprøve 2 finished, with a real ending?
- Did I answer one option in delprøve 1 — not two, and not none?
- Is every point in both instructions covered somewhere?
- Does each sentence have a subject and a verb?
- Are there full stops, and paragraph breaks between points?
- After a time or place at the start of a sentence, does the verb come next?
Phrase bank: the connectors that hold a text together
Missing sammenhængsmarkører is one of the most common criticisms in the examiner assessments — and it is the cheapest thing to fix, because a short list covers almost everything.
Sequencing Først… · Derefter… · Bagefter… · Til sidst…
Adding Desuden… · Også… · Ud over det… · Samtidig…
Contrasting Men… · Alligevel… · På den anden side… · I stedet for…
Cause and effect Derfor… · Fordi… · Det betyder, at… · Af den grund…
Opening a semi-formal message Jeg skriver til jer, fordi… · Jeg vil gerne klage over… · Jeg har set jeres opslag om…
Opening a reply to a friend Tak for din mail! · Hvor er det dejligt at høre fra dig. · Du spurgte, hvordan…
Remember the inversion: Derfor har jeg…, Bagefter gik vi…, Til sidst vil jeg… — the verb comes straight after the connector.
Related guides
- PD2 Written Production: How to Build a Strong Answer — the structure to write into once you know what to avoid.
- How to Pass Prøve i Dansk 2 — how the three parts combine into your result.
- PD2 Reading: Tips for All 5 Task Types — the other half of the written day.
- The PD2 exam format — parts, timing and what is assessed.
Practise PD2 writing in Bestå
Knowing which mistakes are expensive only helps if you can see which ones you make. Bestå gives you PD2-format writing tasks to answer against the clock, then feedback on structure, coherence, grammar and vocabulary — graded on the official scale, so you can watch a band change as the repair work goes down.
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