Help on Making a Story

Chapter Seven: Formal Writing

Formal writing! Pah! That's for teachers and stuff, not for me!

If you are done writing essays, CONGRATULATIONS! Your path ahead is clear--avoid anything to do with essays, or, as I call them, Assignments of Doom when Your Elders Decide to Torture You Slowly Until You Die a Very Painful Death! Or, if you don't feel like saying all of that, ADYEDTYSUYDAVPDA! (I added in a few vowels so that it's not just a bunch of random letters! Oh, wait...I mean...nothing. Never mind.). If you're done writing essays, I recommend...reading this anyway, because it still helps in life when writing to your boss and applying for college and all other boring stuff that people will never have to stop doing. Sigh.

Okay, so instead of being listed, this is just gonna be straight-out and ultra-boring. Here we go (and by the way, if you die of boredom, your family is not allowed to sue me to help you get a burial spot):

Don't use the word "and," ladies and gentlemen, to start a sentence! Teachers will hate you for that! Ah, yes, the ultimate mistake! You can see their eyes narrowing and their talons extending! Instead, use the word "also," or, if you accidentally do it anyway, tell your teacher, "Oh, my brother must have been playing with the computer and edited it a bit by accident" or maybe any other wild excuse you can come up with. As long as it's not, "my dog did it," because no matter what version you say that in, it's never believable. Even if your guinea pig did it instead and they only chewed the CORNER of your math homework! Hmph.

"In general, it is inappropriate simply to write as you would speak. In conversation, the listener can ask for clarification or elaboration easily, and thus the speaker can use imprecise language, ramble from topic to topic freely, and so on. Formal writing must instead stand on its own, conveying the author's thesis clearly through words alone. As a result, formal writing requires substantial effort to construct meaningful sentences, paragraphs, and arguments relevant to a well-defined thesis. The best formal writing will be difficult to write but very easy to read. The author's time and effort spent on writing will be repaid with the time and effort saved by the (many) readers."

Okay, so I got this off the internet, ladies and gentlemen: "Tips for Formal Writing, Technical Writing..." Whatever. So, now it's my job to decipher what this dude just said. Here we go: Don't write it as you would speak. If you're gonna say,

"I just got a job at McDonald's and it's, like, great, but the clerk is, like, so mean, her name is Jenny and she, like, chews bubble gum really loudly and, like, she always yells at me and, like, sleeps on the job."

This is what you do:

"I recently received a job at McDonald's. I find it very suitable, but I dislike the clerk, Jenny. She chews bubble gum very loudly, which I find irksome, along with yelling at me and sleeping on the job constantly."

Pretty much, write it as you would say it and then do a LOT of editing! Replace as many words as possible with very complicated, impressive words like I just did above. Also, unless you're writing about yourself, refrain from using the words "I," "we," or any other first-person language. Instead, use words like, "one" and "the reader."

When you're writing a quote exactly how it is, you do this: "She walked to the corner store, turned right, and, her eyes glued to the map in front of her, walked across the street and entered the store Flourish and Blotts"(123)[sic]. 123 is for the page number (I made that up, by the way, along with the quote, no one ever walks through Diagon Alley with a map!!!) and the [sic] is saying that it's written exactly how it is. If you find any grammar mistakes or anything, still write it with those grammar mistakes and just include the [sic] thingy! Otherwise, there's no need for it.

Then there's this: "Paragraphs, subsections, sections, chapters, and books all use the same structure: first make the topic clear, then expand upon it, and finally sum up, tying everything back to the topic. At each level, you need to tell the reader what you will be trying to say (in this paragraph, section, etc.), then you need to cover all the relevant material, clearly relating it to your stated point, and finally you need to tie the subtopics together so that they do indeed add up to establish the point that you promised."

Off of the same website. Okay, so this means that you write your introduction, bla de bla de bla, and then the THESIS. The thesis is your mortal enemy in life, and I am teaching you how to tame that horrible freak of nature. A thesis is the last sentence in your introduction, and throughout the entire essay it will be the main topic. When you are done with the body paragraph/paragraphs, make sure that the conclusion ties it all together.

YOU LIVED! I know this was probably short, but hey, I'm not one for formal writing. Please vote if you like it! Well, if it helped, anyway. Thank you!