Hey Bri MT,
I find I have the same problem, can you please elaborate what you mean?
Thank you
Whys has some great things to look out for in their post so definitely recommend you read that. Some of what I'm going to go into here is too detailed for you to talk about well in VCE English but may help to inform your ability to detect and construct formality.
Let's take for example these:
1. "The green sea turtle
chelonia mydas is a national icon and efforts to preserve this species must be undertaken by parliament. "
2. "Govt must SAVE the green sea turtle NOW! It's a national icon."
1 is more formal than 2 and there are a few features we could pull apart to look at that.
- 1 uses compound complex sentence structure whereas 2 uses simple sentences.
- 2 uses abbreviations ("Govt")
- 2 breaks standard English conventions on capitalisation
- In highly formal writing "!" won't show up much, if at all
- Very formal language tends to be less overtly emotive
- 1 uses more formal language
- As whys mentioned, passive sentences are more formal "Green sea turtle must be saved by parliament" is passive, "Parliament must save the green sea turtle" is active. My physics teacher used to say that to check if something is agentless passive, see if you can add "by zombies" onto the end. For example, "the chocolates were eaten
by zombies" works as does "Green sea turtles must be saved
by zombies" so that tells us that "the chocolates were eaten" and "green sea turtles must be saved" are both agentless passive.
Note: It's important to recognise that informal to formal is a spectrum with a bunch of elements feeding into it, so it's important to consider a range of elements when deciding how formal something is. Don't for example, just rule it out because it has a feature that's more informal than formal o vice versa - consider it holistically.
My advice would be to go for the most stand-out features first. For example, if I was reading "The purchaser must henceforth remove any materials comprising, derived from, or relating to the purchase and cannot reinstall any component thereof subject to the agreement (XI(iv))" I wouldn't use that "cannot" was written rather than "can not" as evidence of formality and would use stronger evidence instead.
Re: Tone thought I'd add in this piece here
Formal language might be used to add to a sense of authority or credibility, informal language might be used to create a sense of friendliness or humour. There's also many more ways formal and informal language can be used so don't think you're restricted to what I've mentioned here. Imo it's more important to "feel" to the tone and understand how that's constructed, why etc. rather than focusing on specific tone lists. That being said, tone lists can be a good resource if you struggle to intuitively feel tone or to find words that specifically and accurately describe it.
Again, I'm not overly familiar with VCE English assessment so take what I say with a grain of salt and pick out the bits useful to you