Formal letter to the Headmaster: format marks versus language marks
Forty-five students wrote a 10-mark formal letter to the Headmaster asking permission to take Class X to the district library for a reading day. The scheme is format 4, content 4, language 2. You find that 31 letters have no date; 18 begin "Dear Headmaster"; 12 close with "Yours lovingly"; 9 never state the date of the visit; 6 give no number of students. One script, by Rikchi, has the date, a correct salutation ("The Headmaster, Rongram High School"), a three-sentence body that mentions 40 students and the visit date but never says why the library matters, and closes "Yours lovingly, Rikchi" with no class or section. Rikchi's Garo is otherwise clean. Board instructions require the letter to be in Garo except for proper nouns and established institutional terms.
1. Mark Rikchi's letter out of 10 and justify each component.
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Format 2/4. Date present (1). Salutation correct in form and address (1). Subscription wrong - "Yours lovingly" is for relatives, not a Headmaster (0). Sender's class/section missing (0).
Content 2.5/4. The request is made and two useful facts are given (40 students, date of visit) - that is the core of the letter. But the reason for the visit is absent, and a Headmaster deciding on a trip needs the purpose. Without it the request is not fully persuasive.
Language 2/2. The Garo is clean and the register is polite; nothing here is being penalised.
Total 6.5/10.
The reasoning matters more than the number: Rikchi has lost most format marks for two small conventional items, not for weak Garo. Feedback should say so, or the student will conclude that formal letters are about sounding clever rather than following a layout.
2. Several students used "library", "reading day" and "Headmaster" in English. Is that a language error?
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No - treat these as established institutional terms and proper nouns, which the board instruction already exempts. Penalising them would teach students to invent awkward Garo coinages for words their readers already use.
The line to draw:
- Accept: names of institutions, posts, and words with no settled everyday Garo equivalent in the class's usage.
- Do not accept as a substitute for taught vocabulary: common words the class has been taught in Garo, where the English is a shortcut rather than a borrowing.
- Register errors are separate: "Yours lovingly" is not a borrowing problem, it is a wrong-relationship problem, and it belongs under format.
Announce the policy before the next letter task so students are not guessing. A rule applied silently is a rule students cannot learn.
3. Rewrite the first two sentences of the body so the purpose is clear and the request is polite.
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Original (typical): "I beg to state that we are 40 students of Class X. We want to go to the district library on 12 March."
Rewrite: "I am writing on behalf of the 40 students of Class X to request permission to visit the district library on 12 March for a reading day. The visit would let us use the reference section and the Garo newspaper files, which our school library does not keep, and we would return before the last period."
Why it works:
- The purpose is in the first sentence, not the last.
- "I am writing to request" is a polite frame without the over-formal "I beg to state".
- The second sentence supplies the reason the original lacked, which is where the missing content marks were.
- The return-time clause answers the Headmaster's obvious practical worry before it is raised.