I'll try and give some of my ideas off the top of my head
(but I'm no expert)
In very simple terms, informal texts will share elements of spoken conversations and use far more personal expressions (opinionated ideas). They will also have simpler sentence structures and may not have proper grammar. Informal text often includes attempts to mimic elements of prosodic features like emphasis on words through capitalisation, ridiculous amounts of exclamation marks and quotation marks around words to denote connotations (often sarcasm). Also, an informal lexicon will be used, so words belonging to slang and colloquialisms will often by abundant. Informal texts will often address the audience directly (e.g. using personal 2nd person pronouns) because there is a larger level of intimacy in informal language. Metaphor can be used to portray a resemblance between two things rather than explicitly explaining how one thing shares the characteristics of another.
Formal texts are for more cold and impersonal. They will not directly address the reader, but merely state facts for the audience to interpret themselves. They'll be very objective and offer little insight into the author's personal opinion. Instead, their opinion is expressed (if at all) through the information conveyed in the text. Sentences may be far more complex, using various techniques such as anaphora and listing to aid the cohesion of the text (link the text together and allow for an easy flow or reading). PASSIVE SENTENCE STRUCTURE is a big one, because all to often you'll see people try to obscure the information regarding a topic by omitting the agent (the noun which would usually be the subject of a sentence). Passive language has other uses too, though. Nominalisation is also a common, which is the process of converting pretty much anything (usually verb phrases) into some kind of noun/noun phrase. This allows for further obscurity and abstractness which can make the audience confused as to what exactly the sentence is about, BUT it can also allow for abstract, pre-established concepts to be easily placed in sentences in a compact fashion, when talking about inherently complex things. Formal language will try to be factual and won't expect very much inference from the audience; most information will be explained in denotative way (compared to packing the text with connotations and slang).
My guide when working out if something is formal or not is 'can I see a lawyer writing that?'. And if determining whether something is informal, I ask 'is this guy trying to make a real social connection to the audience'. The writers of formal texts don't care about making you laugh or sharing an inside joke with you through connotations and loaded language, they are impersonally communicating.
Anyway I'm sure that all sounds rough and I'm also sure there's probably some incorrect stuff in there, but I'm learning this all as I go just like you are so hopefully this will assist in your basic understanding of some common differences between the two things
PS: I know that feel when it comes to missing stuff from your textbooks; mine still hasn't even come yet so I need to get that sorted before I become overly reliant on the internet for my knowledge
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