Is Summarize Written Text marked on spelling in PTE?

No — Summarize Written Text has no separate Spelling trait. In the current Score Guide its four traits are Content, Form, Grammar and Vocabulary, and spelling isn't one of them. If your SWT score is low, your typos are almost certainly not the main reason.

The four traits SWT is actually scored on

Content carries the most weight (0–4), Form is a single point (0–1) for staying inside 5–75 words as one sentence, and Grammar and Vocabulary are worth up to 2 points each. That's the whole table. The Score Guide is a free download from Pearson and worth reading once — many prep sites still reproduce the older seven-point rubric, in which Content was worth only 2 points.

The tasks that do have a Spelling trait

Write Essay and Summarize Spoken Text each carry an explicit Spelling trait: 2 points for correct spelling throughout, 1 for a single error, 0 for more than one. That's where a typo is genuinely expensive, and it's why a habit of proofreading is worth building even though SWT doesn't penalise spelling directly.

Write from Dictation is different again — it's scored on correctly spelled words reproduced from the audio, so a misspelling there simply means that word isn't counted.

How a typo can still hurt you in SWT

Indirectly, and only sometimes. A mistyped word that reads as a different, wrong word can be marked down under Vocabulary as an inappropriate choice. A typo that breaks agreement or removes a needed function word can be picked up under Grammar. But there's no dedicated deduction, and one slipped letter in an otherwise well-formed sentence is not what's holding your score down.

Consistent British or American spelling is fine — you're not penalised for choosing one standard variety over another.

What's more likely dragging the score

The usual suspects: Form, because the summary ran over 75 words or accidentally became two sentences. Then Content, because the summary latched onto an example or a striking statistic instead of the passage's main argument. Then Grammar, because a 70-word single sentence collapsed halfway through under the weight of three subordinate clauses.

If you want to find yours, write the same summary twice — once at 60 words with a simple main clause plus two 'which' clauses, once the way you normally do — and see which one scores better.

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