The register that gave it away

A complaint letter containing the sentence 'I was pretty annoyed, to be honest' failed to achieve anything, and the writer concluded that the company did not care. The company's own training materials suggest a different explanation.

Register is the match between the language of a message and the situation it is in, and it carries information independently of content. A complaint written in a conversational register is read, by someone processing a hundred a day, as a minor irritation rather than a formal demand, because the people who intend escalation write differently. The reader is not making a judgement about the writer; they are sorting, and the sorting criteria include language.

The features that signal a formal complaint are specific and learnable. Dates and reference numbers in the first line. A statement of the outcome sought, early and in one sentence. Factual description in the past tense with no evaluative adjectives, which paradoxically reads as more serious than strong feeling. A named remedy and a deadline. And, where applicable, a sentence naming the next step if the deadline passes.

None of this is about being polite or impolite. The conversational letter was polite; so is a formal one. What differs is whether the message looks like the kind of thing that will have consequences, and that appearance is produced by structure and by the absence of certain words.

For a learner this is a more useful target than vocabulary size. Knowing more words does not help if they are drawn from one register, and the skill being tested in most written examinations is precisely the ability to produce the register the task implies, which is why a brilliant informal answer to a formal task scores badly.