Informal Writing

Informal writing can also be referred to as draft writing, discovery writing or even exploratory writing. Informal writing, therefore, might be a rough draft that is done by the writer in order to have an overview of the final document. Mainly informal writing is done in the classroom to help students draft a more consistent paper. Informal writing helps the students to make changes through reduction, addition, rubbing and deleting irrelevant words. Once all these are done, a student is expected to draft a final copy consisting of all main ideas included in the previous draft.

Informal writing helps to increase the students’ participation in the class. This can be done through informal grading and exploring more ideas with the help of the teacher. It also gives a student more room for improvement, as the student is guided on areas to improve in the final paper.

Informal writing is unrehearsed writing which is not polished or even scholarly. It is aimed at learning something and not necessarily writing about the current information. There are different forms of informal writing. One of the forms of informal writing is listing or outlining a plan or main ideas that are going to form the core points of the final draft. Informal writing might also be through electronic posting which involves answering questions on the discussion board in the classroom. Also, it may be an in-class minute notes that make a proposal on application of a theory that was learnt in the class. This form of writing gives students space and time to reflect on the content they might not ordinarily have. One of the important roles played by informal writing is to serve as a bridge between exploring and understanding the overall content of the draft.

Informal writing is used by lecturers to gain an immediate sense of how students understand the content of the learned material. It also helps them to focus and facilitate class discussions in order for the students to learn the classroom materials. This is an important aspect to the lecturer rather than learning the performance of the students when it is too late.

Informal writing promotes thinking through clarifying ideas, generating ideas and even crystallizing student’s arguments. In formal writing, there is a well defined style of writing that has to be followed in order to be acceptable. This is not the case with informal writing which has no formal way that it is outlined to be followed. As a result, the style is direct and mainly relies on contractions, abbreviator short sentences, short video clips and even ellipses.

Informal writing does not concentrate on the formality of the language used, as long as the language is understandable. As a result, the student is allowed to use simple language which is informal before writing a formal draft. Sentence structure and even paragraphs are not emphasized during writing a draft.

In conclusion, formal writing results to a rough paper that is to be edited in order to have the important content and ideas which are later transferred to the final copy of the paper. There are no instructions to be followed during this form of writing unlike in formal writing.