How to find formal way to say informal sentence in TV shows? [closed]
A lot of online articles recommend learning spoken English from soap operas, such as Friends, and How I Met Your Mother. I know that most of the expressions in the TV shows are informal. They are good for daily informal conversations. However, I want to learn formal English as well, which can be formal spoken English and formal writing. More importantly, it is a good exercise to transfer between formal and informal sentences. It produces the following two questions.
- How can I find the corresponding formal sentence for any sentence in the soap operas?
How can I find the corresponding informal sentence for any sentence in the formal TV shows, such as Ted talk or lectures?
How can you find a formal version of something said informally in a Tv sitcom?
It’s not only slang; it’s that there may be no one-to-one conversation whose topic is appropriate in a different setting. One formal term for this is register. How friends chat is different from conversations between a boss and an employee, a student and a teacher, a child and his grandparents, legislators discussing policy on the Senate floor.
I find that contractions are in fact used in formal speech, even sometimes (although very carefully) in academic journals, non-fiction books, and newspaper articles.
The TED talks you mention—as well as speeches and lectures—have frequent contractions. What they also have that conversations don’t have is complete, well-formed sentences. These talks are carefully written and organized, and often read from cue cards or a teleprompter.
On the other hand, interviews have some of the features of spontaneous conversations. An experienced person like Bill Gates may speak primarily in complete sentences, but every now and then a sentence is revised midway through, or a thought restarted, and a phrase too informal for a TED talk is used. There’s a recent Gates interview on the coronavirus pandemic that has some of these qualities.
The TV channels CSPAN-2 and CSPAN-3 have book discussions and lectures—some interviews and Q&A. You could compare these to sitcoms.