When it comes to choices of style (whether to use a contraction or first person pronoun or relatively short clauses or non-standard grammar or common/general words as opposed to technical vocabulary), the choice should depend on the audience, genre, and purpose for writing (i.e. to be accepted or, as stated by Brett, to "provoke"). If secondary students are eventually going to college, it makes sense to look at examples of the kinds of writing they will be expected to produce and ask how stylistic features are used in them. Do science lab reports use the first person? If not, why? Do published book reviews use contractions? Does this vary according to where the reviews are published? Does the genre of literary analysis as present in academic journals tend toward long, complex sentences with many embedded clauses? And why?

I tell my students that all language use is guided by the conflict between expressing individual thoughts and fitting into a community of language users (even when we want to provoke, we want the audience to get the message, otherwise we don't say a thing). The same is true of writing. If secondary students want to enter the academic community of universities, secondary teachers are obliged to look at the language used in university settings and use it as models so that students will have the linguistic resources to succeed if they so desire. We don't need to tell students to always use or not use some feature such as contractions or "I"--we want our students to be, in my words "rhetorical badasses". They should be able to size up any rhetorical situation by reading a few examples of the genre or community of users and then, if they want, add to the discussion in a way that the audience will accept while meeting their own goal (to console, acknowledge, provoke, etc.) and expressing their unique ideas.

"Formal English" is probably too broad a category because it covers many genres and discourse communities who have differing conventions.

Rob



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