Does Write from Dictation count capital letters and full stops?

No. In Pearson's official Score Guide, Write from Dictation has exactly one scoring line: 1 point for each correct word spelled correctly, 0 for each incorrect or misspelled word. There is no trait for capitalisation or punctuation, so a lowercase first letter or a missing full stop does not cost you a point. You can stop retraining your typing habits and put that effort into spelling instead.

Spelling is the actual gate

A word you heard correctly but typed wrong scores zero for that word. 'Goverment' earns nothing; a missing comma costs nothing. That asymmetry is the whole strategy for this item type.

The words that catch people are ordinary academic ones of the kind WFD uses: government, environment, accommodation, questionnaire, curriculum, assessment, laboratory, phenomenon, colleagues, bureaucracy. If you are losing points here, they are almost certainly in a list like that rather than in the grammar of the sentence.

What is genuinely worth your keystrokes

Type every word you actually caught, in the order you caught it. Do not stop to fix capitalisation mid-sentence, do not go back to add punctuation, and do not re-read the whole thing for tidiness — you have a limited window and each recovered word is a real point.

British and American spellings are both accepted as long as you stay consistent within a response, so 'organisation' and 'organization' are equally safe. Do not switch to a spelling you are less confident in because you think one variety is preferred.

One caveat worth knowing

Scoring details are published by Pearson and can be revised. If something material rides on this — a visa deadline, a final attempt — confirm against the current official Pearson Score Guide rather than any third-party summary, including this one.

What has been stable is the shape of the trait: WFD is a word-level, spelling-sensitive item with no formatting component.

Where the marks really go

Because Write from Dictation feeds both Listening and Writing, small consistent spelling losses here quietly hold down two section scores at once. That makes it one of the highest-return items on the test for a candidate stuck a few points short — and one of the easiest to drill, because the fix is a spelling list, not a skill.

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