hi everyone in today's video i'm going to talk about seven things you should never do in your
writing and these seven quick tips will help you to take your writing to a higher level
and help you get better grades and scores on any writing assignment that you have but before we get
started I want to really quickly talk about the difference between formal and informal so first
let's start with the word informal informal means casual or not serious and we use informal language
when we're talking with friends and family and in writing we might use informal language when we're
communicating with friends and family or writing texts sometimes writing emails like emails to
people that we know well and social media messages like posts that you might put on instagram or
facebook or tick tock and in informal writing we don't have to follow these kinds of rules as much
but on the other hand formal writing is more serious situations formal writing is the kind of
writing that we do for school for work for taking a test like the toefl and writing a cover letter
or some kind of letter for an application like a job application or a scholarship application
and for formal writing we need to use more formal writing conventions or writing rules that help us
to fit this kind of formal situation so the rules or tips i'm going to give you today apply to those
formal situations when you're writing an essay for school when you're writing a cover letter
for a job application a report for your job or a memo at work or when you're writing a kind of test
like when you're taking the toefl or the ielts test number one don't use contractions
contractions are short words that are actually a combination of two words that we put together
some examples are i'm for I am don't for do not can't for cannot but we don't use them
in formal writing so tip number one don't use contractions instead write the full form
number two don't say etc or and so on sometimes when we want to give some examples we might give
a couple examples and then say etc or and so on but this is considered like kind of a lazy
person's method of explaining something and it's not the job of the reader to figure out
that information it's the job of the writer to provide that information so when you're writing
don't use etc or and so on instead give two or three clear good examples and you're finished
number three don't use slang or profanity so this one is a little bit tricky because sometimes you
might not know what words are considered slang or profanity and if you're not sure about the word
profanity profanity means like dirty words or cuss words or words that we don't use around um
people that we don't know well or older people or at work that kind of language that is considered
rude or inappropriate so i'll give you a quick example of this one I had a student once who was
writing an essay and she wanted to say that she made her mother angry and she said I pissed my
mother off so while this isn't exactly profanity it is considered inappropriate it's not something
that you should say with people that you don't know or in formal situations so that's an example
of how we have to be careful with the kind of language that we use and this one might be tricky
for you if you've learned english from listening listening to people around you or watching tv or
movies because the kind of language that we use in conversation is much less formal than the kind
of language that we should use in writing and that means that people use slang and bad words
when they're talking to each other but that kind of language should not be used in formal writing
if you're not sure about that try to google like common slang in the us or profanity or bad words
and try to find out what those words are so that you can avoid them number four don't use
most abbreviations so we use abbreviations a lot when we are writing in different types of
situations for example if you're writing to a friend you might use an abbreviation
or if you're listening to a professor and taking notes you should use abbreviations but we don't
use abbreviations in formal writing for example we often say the word vocab for vocabulary but when
you are writing the word you should write the full word vocabulary another example is that when we're
taking notes we might abbreviate the word people as ppl but again we're not going to put that in
formal writing there is one exception to this rule which is a type of abbreviation called acronyms
acronyms are abbreviations that use the first letter of each word for example
WHO is the world health organization these kinds of abbreviations are considered
more common and standard and it is okay for you to use those in writing but the convention that
we usually follow is that the first time you use this you're going to write the full form and then
in parentheses you're going to put the acronym or abbreviation and then if you want to use it again
in your essay you can use just the abbreviation that's a way for you to kind of announce the
abbreviation to say what the full form is and then the reader will know what you're referring
to and acronyms are very common you know for example CDC is the Center for Disease Control
USA is United States of America ESL is English as a Second Language and so on
number five don't use fanboys at the beginning of a sentence so maybe you're familiar with fanboys
fanboys are coordinating conjunctions for and nor but or yet and so and fanboys are used to
connect two or more similar things so you can connect two or more nouns
two or more verbs or two or more clauses with a coordinating conjunction in the middle
but we don't start sentences with these so for example if you want to start a sentence with
but you're going to take out that fanboy and use a word that has the same meaning
however one thing I want to point out here is that you will often see fanboys used
at the beginning of a sentence in other types of writing in newspapers magazines novels articles
those kinds of writing can have fanboys at the beginning of a sentence but those are
professional writers and the way that they might play with the language or use words is different
from how we should use language in formal situations number six don't use wrong format
so in the united states we have specific ways that we want the writing to look on paper that's what
we mean by format how large is the print do you use bold or not how large are the margins around
the edge of the page what should a paragraph look like and in other countries there may be other
types of format but in the us we have specific rules for formatting and those rules matter
we like to see writing that looks that way so if you're writing an essay make sure you
know what the format should look like if you're writing a cover letter for a job find out what
the format is for that type of writing if you're writing another type of like a report at work
find out what the format should look like and I have a video about how to use the correct
format for writing for school and i'll leave a link in the description box below for that
and finally number seven don't use wrong spaces so what do we mean by this what I mean
by this is that you have to use spaces uh next to punctuation next to commas periods etc and there
are some rules for these what you're going to do is every time you put punctuation like a comma
period question mark exclamation point semicolon or colon you're gonna click the space bar because
we always put one space after those punctuation don't put a space before it just put one space
after those punctuation marks however there are a couple of exceptions parentheses we actually
do the opposite we put one space before the parenthesis and no space after the same thing for
quotation marks we put one space before and then no space after so again just learn the rules for
those and check to make sure that you're using them correctly when you are typing and pretty
soon they will become second nature you won't even think about them anymore I hope that this
video helped you to feel more confident in your writing if you have questions as always please
let me know and if you found this video helpful don't forget to give it a like and make sure that
you are subscribed so you don't miss any upcoming videos take care and I will see you next time!