Changing Informal Sentences into Formal Style

As it is explained in the previous post, which is  Formal and Informal Writing: Verb and Noun Usage, formal academic writing lies on the balance of verb and noun that has been used. However, a significant difference can be seen in more usage of nouns than the verb. Thus, in this article it is explained how to change the informal writing into formal sentence.

Have a look an example of the sentence below,

For the USSR, the war had been a huge economic disaster in which the number of people who lost their lives was so serious that its full extent was probably not disclosed.

In addition to change the informal into formal style, the first step that you must follow is understand the clauses. Accordingly, the number of clauses in a sentence are determined via the number of the verbs, thus, the following analysis of the previous sentence is (pay attention on the verbs that are written in bold)

For the USSR, the war had been a huge economic disaster in which the number of people who lost their lives was so serious that its full extent was probably not disclosed

After checking thoroughly, the sentence has 4 verbs, which are:

1. had been ...
2. lost ...
3. was ...
4. was not disclosed ...

These four verbs indicate there are four clauses in this single sentence. Thus, if we want to change this informal writing, we must reduce the number of verbs (the clauses) into less than four verbs. To do so, we must first change the verb into noun, and the selected verbs are:

• lost, which is from lose, the noun is loss
• disclosed, which is from disclose, the noun is disclosure

So, by replacing these words, the sentence becomes

For the USSR, the war had been a huge economic disaster in which the number of people who loss their lives was so serious that its full extent disclosure

This sentence is confusing as the verbs have been reduced. Note that, in the Word files, the blue underline indicators demonstrate grammatical errors of the sentence. In order to rearrange the sentence, we must join the clauses. Thus,

• the war had been a huge economic disaster
• the number of people who loss their lives
• the number of people was so serious
• the full extent of the people disclosure

Note that, the clauses "the number of people who loss their lives" and "the number of people was so serious", share similar idea, so that, we could combine these two clauses into:

the loss of lives

As a result, the left sentences are:

• the war had been a huge economic disaster
• the loss of lives

Note that, during the transformation of sentence form informal to formal, the independent clause must be determined first. As we know that "the war had been a huge economic disaster" is the main clause in this sentence, then it needs to be focused. By combining these two clauses, the final sentence becomes:

For the USSR, the loss of lives during the war had been a huge economic disaster in which the number of loss was needed to be disclosed

The complete sentence has been paraphrased into the above sentence. For the PDF material, please access it in the following link (Gdrive)