Death penalty

Formal text:

Death penalty is a punishment that has been use for a long time. As long as we can remember, death penalty has been a method to punish criminals. However, over the past century, many countries has abolished death penalty, and today only a few still practice it. Most of them are in Africa and Asia, but also USA still practice death penalty. In America, 33 out of 50 states still have death penalty. Every year around 30 to 50 persons are executed in USA, and even more are sitting on “death row”, the prison where prisoners sentenced to death are imprisoned. Over thousand prisoners are sitting in death row for many years, just waiting to die. 

The most common method of execution is lethal injections. This is considered to be the most human way of doing it. Other methods that is used is electrocution, hanging and shooting.

There are enormous debates about this form of punishment. Many organizations work hard towards abolishing death penalty. One of the arguments that is most used, is that death penalty is against the human rights.  They mean that even though a person has killed someone, we should not do the same to him/her, because we know better. It is also widely debated for death penalty, because it prevents and scares people from committing crime. However, it is not proven that countries with death penalty has lower crime rates than others.

Informal text:

Death penalty used to be a normal way of punishing criminals before. Today, most country do not use death as a penalty, but some still do. In USA, around 30 to 50 people are executed every year, and this is very many persons! This is truly a horrible way of punishment. And even worse, over thousands of people are sitting in death row, the prison where the criminals sentenced to death are. They are siting there, year after year, just waiting to be killed! I can’t even imagine how terrible is must be, locked inside a room, waiting to be killed.

Luckily, there are many organizations working against this, such as Amnesty and DPIC. They are working hard with telling people about why we shouldn't have death penalty in our modern society, and collect signatures as a demonstration against it. On their websites, they also have a lot information about this topic, which scares me to read. I read that a man was hanged in 1996. This is only 16 years ago! I thought that hanging was an old-fashioned way of execution, that no one any longer did, something that we hear about in old tales.

I hope that soon we will not have death penalty anywhere in the world!

These two texts shows the differences between informal and formal texts. The formal one, number 1  is written with full words and long sentences. It is objective, just presenting facts about death penalty. I have used words like "however" and "this is considered" instead of writing "I think that" so that it is objective.   The second one, the informal, is written with an easier language. Easier words, and shorter sentences. I also presented my own opinion in this text, I wrote things like " I can’t even imagine how terrible is must be", showing my feelings about this subject. In the informal text, I also used some abbreviations and contractions in the informal text, I wrote "can't" and "won't", but in the formal text I wrote "can not".

You can read more about this here:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org

http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/sep/21/death-penalty-statistics-us