Everything about Formal Written English totally explained
Formal written English is a version of the language that's used by educated English speakers around the world. It takes similar forms regardless of the local spoken dialect. In spoken English, there are a vast number of differences between
dialects,
accents, and varieties of
slang. In contrast, local variations in the formal written version of the language are more limited.
While native speakers refer to
American English,
Australian English,
British English or other varieties of
English, and it's true that many regional differences between the forms of spoken English can be documented, the learner can easily fall into the trap of believing that these are different languages. They are instead mostly regional variations of the spoken language and such variations occur within these countries as well as between them.
Differences
The differences in formal writing that occur in the various parts of the English-speaking world are less pronounced.
To guide his students towards preferred constructions of written English, Paul Brians, a professor at Washington State, a west coast U.S. university, created a popular American
Web site http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/ about errors in English. Certainly, disputes about pronunciation and colloquial expressions used in speech abound. Nevertheless, disputes about the written language are relatively few.
Differences in
spelling such as "color" and "colour" arise more frequently, depending on the subject matter, but these cause no difficulty in comprehension. There are also some different grammatical usages such as the word '
shall' describing the future, more common in British English, according to John Eastwood in his Oxford Practise Grammar. (
OUP 1999)
Variations
Although the regional variations in written English may be less obvious, the spoken language is another matter. However, even here the broad geographical distinctions often used may sometimes have more to do with nationalistic sentiments than rigorous study of the objective facts. Speakers of
General American and the British
Received Pronunciation may find no difficulty in understanding each other's accents because of long exposure in the media, aided by the clarity of pronunciation that's a feature of both these accents. Yet, both may struggle to understand a broad accent from
Glasgow,
Scotland, or from rural
Tennessee, or from
Cornwall (which has its own language that continues to influence the English dialect), a
county in southwest
England, or from the south side of
Chicago, Illinois. By contrast, the Cornish accent may be easily understood by the inhabitants of the islands off
North Carolina, where the accents are still little changed from their Cornish forebears. Equally, the accent of some parts of
Ottawa, the capital of
Canada, is virtually indistinguishable to an outsider from the accent of parts of
Northern Ireland. The generalization that there's a single British accent or a single American accent is unsustainable.
Linguistic Heritage
English speakers, after all, share a common linguistic heritage.
Shakespeare's writing predates the establishment of
Australia,
Canada,
New Zealand, and the
United States; and the union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as the
United Kingdom. Successful novels of the mid-19th century such as
The Moonstone by the British
Wilkie Collins, or
Uncle Tom's Cabin by the American
Harriet Beecher Stowe were published simultaneously in Britain and America without any thought that one or other audience would have any difficulty in understanding the writing of someone from another country. Equally, 150 years later,
The Economist newspaper is published in London but sells more than half its printed copies in North America.
Support
A supporter of the view that there's an Australian written English, for example, and an American written English may counter that many examples appear in the lists of differences below. To put this in perspective, the
Oxford English Dictionary contains around 500,000 entries. In addition, among the differences in regional usage that do occur, the majority are specialized or regional words, which appear quite rarely in formal writing.
The scientific world has already taken advantage of the fact that there's just one version of English in formal written communication by making it the common language of scientific reports. Occasional conflicts of spelling in this area have prompted formal decisions on which word or spelling to use. Committees have ruled, for example, that in scientific writing it's "sulfur" not the British "sulphur" and "aluminium" not the U.S. spelling "aluminum". The number of such rulings, however, is insignificant in the context of a vocabulary of half a million words.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Formal Written English'.
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