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What written Spanish is for, and how much of it you need
Everything in the course up to here has been aimed at speech, which is the right priority. But written Spanish is where a great deal of adult life actually happens — the email to the landlord, the application, the complaint, the message to a colleague you have not met — and it is judged more harshly than speech, because the reader has time. The single most useful thing to know is that Spanish writing is more conservative than Spanish speech and much more conservative than English writing. Formulas survive that English abandoned decades ago: quedo a su disposición, le saluda atentamente, agradeciendo de antemano su atención. They are not ridiculous in Spanish, and leaving them out of a formal letter reads as brusque rather than as modern. At the same time, Spanish officialese is genuinely bad writing and Spaniards say so — there are campaigns for lenguaje claro in administration, and the Fundéu service, run with the Academy, publishes daily guidance on exactly this. So the target is not to write like a form; it is to write plainly while keeping the courtesies. Three practical calibrations. First, register by medium: a WhatsApp to a friend can be as reduced as speech, an email to a colleague uses tú and full words, a letter to an institution uses usted and the formulas. Second, length: Spanish tolerates and even likes longer sentences than English, but a learner should not attempt them — three clear sentences beat one that collapses in the middle. Third, accents: write them. Spanish keyboards make it easy, phones autocorrect, and a text full of missing accents reads to a Spanish eye roughly as English without apostrophes reads to yours. And the thing that will save you most often: ask for the template. Spanish institutions, universities and companies almost always have a modelo de solicitud, a modelo de carta, a formulario, and using it is expected rather than lazy. Copying a good template and changing the content is how native speakers do this too — what Lucía objects to is not that Alex used a form, but that he used the wrong one.