Writing: Informal Letter Register Specifically

Candidates preparing for IELTS Writing typically spend far more time drilling formal, essay-style language than genuinely informal writing, which creates a specific and common failure mode in GT letters addressed to friends or family: the vocabulary is appropriately casual in isolated spots, but the underlying sentence structure, logical connectors, and overall organisation remain those of a formal essay, producing a letter that sounds like a Task 2 paragraph wearing a few casual words as a disguise. This matters directly for Task Achievement in GT Task 1, which assesses register appropriateness across the whole letter, not just at its opening and closing lines — a letter can get "Dear Sarah" and "Take care" exactly right while still losing marks because everything in between reads as stiff, over-organised, or subtly too formal for a message to a friend.

Contractions are the most basic and most reliable marker of informal register, and using them consistently throughout the letter, not just occasionally, is expected: "I'm," "don't," "it's," "can't," "we've," "didn't" should appear naturally wherever they would in real speech to a friend. Writing the full forms throughout instead — "I am writing to inform you that I have not been able to visit" — is not incorrect English, but it reads as stiff and inappropriately formal for this specific register, and a letter that avoids contractions almost entirely, even while using casual vocabulary elsewhere, creates exactly the mixed-register effect that undermines an informal letter's Task Achievement.

Vocabulary choice is where the register shift is most visible, and it works in both directions: certain everyday words and phrases ("a bit," "loads of," "pretty good," "get in touch," "catch up," "no worries") fit naturally in an informal letter in a way they generally wouldn't in a Task 2 essay, while certain formal-register words ("regarding," "furthermore," "in accordance with," "I would be grateful if") sound noticeably out of place dropped into a letter to a close friend, even if the sentence around them is otherwise casual. The goal isn't avoiding sophisticated vocabulary altogether — a wider range of appropriately casual vocabulary is still rewarded on Lexical Resource — but matching the register consistently, choosing the everyday equivalent of a formal phrase throughout rather than switching between registers mid-letter.

Sentence structure and connectors carry register just as much as individual word choices do, and this is the part candidates most often overlook. Formal essay writing favours connectors like "furthermore," "moreover," "in addition," and "consequently," along with longer, more complex sentence structures; natural informal writing favours simpler connectors like "also," "and," "so," and "anyway," along with shorter, more conversational sentences, including the occasional sentence fragment or aside that would look sloppy in an essay but reads as perfectly natural in a letter to a friend — "Anyway, that's all my news for now" is a genuinely well-formed, appropriately informal closing move, not an error, despite not being a complete formal sentence built around a clear main clause and connector.