The Scholarship Email and the Register Trap
Rina is a Year 12 student in Sydney preparing an application for a short exchange program to Yogyakarta. The host school has asked for a one-page 'perkenalan diri' written in Indonesian. Rina drafts it in a friendly, chatty register, using 'kamu' throughout, emojis, and slang such as 'banget' and 'gitu'. Her teacher warns that the readers are teachers at a pesantren-affiliated school who will assess her seriousness as well as her language. Rina has 300 words to work with and wants to include her hobbies, family background, and reasons for applying. She is strong on vocabulary but unsure how formality, pronouns, and sentence structure should shift for an institutional audience. She also wonders whether mentioning her part-time job at a bubble tea shop will seem trivial or show responsibility.
1. Explain how Rina should change her register and pronoun choices for this institutional audience, and justify the changes.
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Rina should shift from an informal peer register to a semi-formal, polite register. Concretely:
- Replace kamu with saya for self-reference and avoid direct second person entirely; an introduction to a school does not address the reader as a friend. Where she must refer to the reader, Bapak/Ibu is appropriate.
- Remove emojis and slang (banget, gitu). These signal peer-to-peer intimacy and would read as flippant to teachers assessing seriousness.
- Use fuller clauses rather than clipped chat syntax. Compare informal 'Saya suka baca, apalagi novel' with a more formal 'Saya memiliki minat yang besar terhadap karya sastra, khususnya novel'.
- Use ber- and meN- verb forms consistently rather than bare root verbs.
The reasoning is audience-and-purpose driven, not a rule that 'formal is always better'. The purpose is to persuade an institutional reader of her maturity, so the register must match the reader's expectations. She can still sound warm through content - specific details, genuine reasons - rather than through slang.
2. Advise Rina on whether and how to include her part-time job, weighing the risk of seeming trivial against the benefit of showing responsibility.
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The job should be kept, but reframed. The risk is not the job itself but how it is described. A bare statement like 'Saya kerja di kedai bubble tea' invites the reader to see it as casual. A framed version shows transferable qualities relevant to an exchange:
- Responsibility and time management: balancing Year 12 study with shifts.
- Communication and teamwork: serving customers, working with colleagues.
- Independence: earning her own money.
A model sentence: 'Di samping sekolah, saya bekerja paruh waktu di sebuah kedai minuman. Pengalaman ini mengajarkan saya mengatur waktu dan berkomunikasi dengan pelanggan dari berbagai latar belakang.'
The judgement call is relevance to the reader's criteria, not prestige of the activity. Since the host school values maturity and adaptability, a modest job framed around those qualities is an asset. She should give it one or two sentences, not a paragraph, so it supports rather than dominates her reasons for applying.