Is greeting always the norm in informal letter writing?
No! I have noticed that many students feel greeting is a necessity in informal letter writing. I wouldn't think your house will be on fire and you will greet your neighbour(s) before asking for help. It is therefore needless to greet when you are asked to write a letter to your uncle asking him for financial help. Go straight to the point and reserve the greeting till when you're concluding the letter.
But I have never been in that situation before so I can't write on it?
You don't have to experience something before you can write on it. If you are to write a story, real or imagined, on the saying, make hay while the sun shines, you can write a story line of a movie you have seen before or a novel you have read before.
Take, for instance, if you are asked to write to your elder sister about the problems you are encountering in a new neighbourhood you just moved into, you can write on some slums you have seen in movies. Of course slums don't have access to clean and safe water. So you can mention that one of the problems you are encountering is access to safe and clean water. But somebody may ask what if the family sink a borehole? You can imagine that the family does not have almost N500,000 or less to sink a borehole because the state government has yet to pay salaries to its staff in the last five months or more. It could be that they are on strike and haven't been paid as a result. Just let your imagination run! You probably want to mention to your elder sister that the reason you and your family had to move into the neighbourhood is that the landlord evicted you is because you couldn't afford to pay rent. In this case, the house could still be without window panes. That is another problem. What problem can you make out of it? Sleeplessness because of mosquito bites!
Which other problem can you mention? Most new neighbourhoods are far from the mainland. The other problem you can mention is the distance to school.
The bottom line is that some of the points can be exaggerated, but not excessively.
Permit me to make some general comments. Did you know (...) is a punctuation mark? It is called ellipsis dot. It shouldn't be more than three dots. Sometimes it could be four. When that is the case, the fourth dot is a full stop. You may wish to type three dots on your laptop and delete it. What you will notice is that the three dots will go off at once because the computer recognized it as a punctuation mark. May I warn never to use this punctuation mark indiscriminately again. See an extract from an online foreign newspaper below.
"I think that when he actually calls reporters names, says they're un-American, says they're enemies of the people ... that phrase has a deep history ..."
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The blogger, Olabanji O. Odurombi, can be contacted via voice call, text, or WhatsApp on 08037699294.
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