Bestå
Most people preparing for PD2 skriftlig fremstilling put their effort into the formal letter — the complaint, the recommendation, the application. It has four bullet points, it looks serious, it feels like the real exam. The e-mail to a friend at the end gets whatever time is left.
That is backwards, and the official assessment guidance says so in one flat sentence: the answer to Delprøve 2 is decisive for the final grade. The e-mail to a friend is not the warm-down. It is the task your grade is built on.
The formal letter's job is smaller and more specific: when examiners are caught between two grades, it is what they look at to settle it.
If you have read advice written for PD3, this is where it will mislead you. In PD3 it is the other way round — the long text carries the grade and the personal e-mail breaks the tie. In PD2, the personal e-mail is the main event. Same two tasks, opposite weighting.
The setup
PD2 skriftlig fremstilling runs 90 minutes, and all dictionaries are allowed (a phrasebook with ready-made sentence translations is not — that counts as cheating). You normally write by hand.
There are two parts and you must write both:
- Delprøve 1 — a half-formal letter. You choose 1A or 1B. You get a short description of a situation and four indholdspunkter (content points) to cover. Typical genres: a review, a complaint, a recommendation, a thank-you letter, an application, an invitation.
- Delprøve 2 — an e-mail replying to a friend. A friend writes to you; their message contains a small number of things they want to hear about — usually two. Minimum 100 words.
Three rules follow from the official guidance, and each one is worth real marks:
- Skip the e-mail and you cannot pass. If you answer only Delprøve 1, the only grades available are 00 or -3. There is no version of this where the formal letter saves you.
- Skip the formal letter and you lose a full grade before quality is even judged. A deduction of one grade is applied up front, which means 12 is off the table. Answering only the e-mail is not a strategy either.
- Answering both 1A and 1B is wasted time. Only your first answer is marked. The second is set aside unread. There is no penalty — but there is no benefit, and you spent minutes you needed elsewhere.
1. Budget your time to match the weighting
Most candidates spend the first hour on the formal letter and then rush 100 words in the last ten minutes. Given what actually carries the grade, invert it.
A workable split for 90 minutes:
- 10 minutes — read both tasks, pick 1A or 1B, underline what each one asks for.
- 30 minutes — Delprøve 1, the formal letter. Four bullets, roughly one short paragraph each.
- 35 minutes — Delprøve 2, the e-mail. This is the graded core; give it room to breathe.
- 15 minutes — read both back. Verbs, word order, spelling.
Choose between 1A and 1B on which one you can write concretely, not which topic sounds more impressive. The one where you can picture the situation is the one where your Danish will flow.
2. Touch every point — this deduction is itemised
The examiner's notes for the e-mail task are specific in a way that should change how you write it. Where a task asks about two things, the guidance states plainly that a deduction is given if the candidate wrote about only one of them.
But — and this is the part that relieves a lot of anxiety — the same notes accept as a fully adequate answer a text that weights one point far more heavily than the other, mentioning the second only briefly. Even an indirect answer to one of them is accepted.
So the rule is not balance. The rule is contact:
Every point your friend raises must be visibly touched somewhere in your text. One of them can be three sentences and the other can be twenty.
This is worth more than it sounds, because it frees you. You do not need an equal amount to say about a topic you have no feeling for. You need one honest sentence that shows you read it.
Before you write the final line of your e-mail, go back to your friend's message and put a finger on each thing they asked. Find where in your text you answered it. If you cannot find it, add a sentence. That thirty-second check is the cheapest mark in the exam.
3. Write to a person, not to a form
Here is the single most useful thing in the assessment guidance for this task. The description of a top-band e-mail praises a text that refers back to the e-mail it received in a natural way, and that has a natural flow with speech-like features.
It goes further, and this surprises people: the top-band text is explicitly noted as not being held together by the usual connectors — derfor, fordi, hvis, the question words. It uses conversational moves and references to the friend's message instead.
That matters because most exam preparation drills those connectors as the route to a good grade. In Delprøve 1 they are exactly right. In Delprøve 2, leaning on them can make your text sound like an essay pretending to be an e-mail.
Weak — three answers stacked in a row:
Jeg går til dansk to gange om ugen. Det er svært. I min fritid løber jeg.
Strong — a reply to somebody:
Tak for din mail — den kom faktisk lige, da jeg sad og ærgrede mig over mine verber! Danskkurset går bedre, end jeg havde regnet med, men to aftener om ugen efter arbejde er hårdt, det må jeg indrømme.
Same facts. One of them was written to someone.
Concrete ways to refer back:
- Name what they said: "Du spurgte til…", "Du skrev, at…"
- React to it: "Hvor er det dejligt at høre, at…", "Det ærgrer mig, at…"
- Turn it around: "Og hvad med dig — er du stadig…?"
- Use a little spoken Danish: "…, ikke?", "Det må jeg indrømme.", "Ja, altså…"
4. The 100 words are a floor, not a target
The minimum exists to tell you how much text the task needs. It is not a counting exercise for the examiner.
The guidance is explicit: examiners should not, as a rule, count the words in your answer. Only a serious deviation counts against you.
Two things follow.
Stop counting mid-exam. Every minute spent tallying words is a minute not spent making a sentence better. If you have written three or four real paragraphs that answer everything, you are past the minimum.
Never pad. Padding is the fastest way to lose the exact quality the top band rewards. Repeating yourself in slightly different words, listing your daily routine hour by hour, or bolting on a paragraph that answers nothing — all of it makes your text read as filled rather than written. A tight 120-word e-mail with a real voice beats a limp 180-word one every time.
5. There is no required opening or closing formula
Candidates lose sleep over how to start and end. The guidance settles it: there is no explicit requirement that the e-mail be opened and closed in any particular way.
Write a natural greeting and a natural sign-off and move on. Kære Anna / Hej Anna to open. Kærlig hilsen, Mange hilsener, Vi ses snart to close. Do not spend exam minutes engineering them, and do not let a memorised formal formula — Med venlig hilsen — leak in from Delprøve 1. That one belongs in the letter to the housing association, not the message to your friend.
6. Write about what you actually know
PD2 is a language test, not a knowledge test — this is stated directly in the official guidance. You are not being marked on whether your opinions are interesting or your facts are right.
There is one limit worth knowing. If your text is so thin on real content that it could not function as an actual e-mail in real life, then there is not enough language there to judge, and that does affect the grade.
The practical version: choose the true, small, specific detail over the impressive general one. "Min nabo spiller trompet om søndagen" gives you more usable Danish than "Danmark er et interessant land." Concrete content is not decoration — it is the material your Danish is assessed on.
Common mistakes
- Treating the e-mail as the small task. It is the one that carries the grade.
- Skipping it because time ran out. Only Delprøve 1 answered means 00 or -3, whatever the letter is like.
- Answering both 1A and 1B. The second one is not read.
- Silently dropping one of your friend's points. An itemised deduction, and completely avoidable.
- Formal register in an informal e-mail. Med venlig hilsen to a close friend reads as a genre error.
- Padding to reach 100 words. Nobody is counting; the padding is visible.
- One long block of text. Paragraphs are part of how organisation is assessed. Three or four short ones.
- Answering a different task from the one set. Going off-brief costs marks but rarely drops you below the pass line on its own. Writing a genuinely different task means that part of the exam has not been completed.
Danish phrase bank — the informal e-mail
Drill these until they arrive without effort. They are the scaffolding; your content goes between them.
Opening and referring back Kære Anna, · Hej Anna, · Tak for din mail! · Hvor var det dejligt at høre fra dig. · Du spurgte, hvordan det går med… · Du skrev, at du… · Undskyld, jeg først svarer nu.
Telling and describing Der er sket en del, siden vi sidst skrev sammen. · Jeg må indrømme, at… · Det bedste ved det er… · Til gengæld er det lidt hårdt, at… · Jeg havde ikke regnet med, at… · Ærligt talt…
Opinions and feelings Jeg synes faktisk, at… · Det gør mig glad, når… · Det kan godt være lidt stressende. · Jeg glæder mig til… · Jeg savner…
Turning it back to them Og hvad med dig? · Hvordan går det egentlig med…? · Du må endelig fortælle mig, om… · Skriv snart!
Closing Vi ses forhåbentlig snart. · Pas godt på dig selv. · Mange hilsener, · Kærlig hilsen,
Related guides
- PD2 Written Production: How to Build a Strong Answer — the wider written exam, including Delprøve 1
- How to Pass Prøve i Dansk 2 — all four skills and how the grades combine
- PD3 Writing: Delprøve 1, the Personal E-mail — the same task at PD3, weighted the opposite way
- PD2 Reading: Tips for All Task Types — the other paper on written exam day
Practise the PD2 e-mail in Bestå
Bestå gives you PD2-format writing tasks — an informal e-mail with a friend's message and its bullet points, just like the exam. Write your answer against the clock, then get feedback on whether you covered every point, how your text is organised, your register, and your grammar and vocabulary, graded on the official scale. Doing three or four of these is the fastest way to stop counting words and start writing to a person.