Let's start by looking at formality. To help us decide how formal to be, we have to ask ourselves the question, who am I writing to? We can't really say there's an absolute formal style and an absolute informal style, so it might be better to think of a line between very formal and very informal with neutral somewhere in between. As long as we choose somewhere approximately along the line that's appropriate for the situation, we should be okay. Think about these situations where you're writing to someone. Would you be more formal or more informal or just neutral?

So now you know that the relationship between the writer and the reader helps us to decide whether to be formal or informal, but how do we make our writing formal or informal? Read the following three emails and decide which one is formal, which one is neutral, and which is informal. What helped you decide? You probably looked at how the words were different, right? Well that is one way we can change the formality. We changed the vocabulary.