Writing and Speaking

There exists a difference between spoken and written forms of a language. Everyone knows that there is a difference but no one can pinpoint what the exact difference is. Experts of language are even more confused and divided on this topic than a layman. This is because in truth, the differences are not clear cut. Both mediums share the same underlying grammar of the language and can be used to fulfil the same functions. In a modern society, speaking and writing have been used to do different things. This is where the difference comes from. That is why writing is not speech and speech not writing. Thus, one cannot say that writing is more than speech or judge one medium by its closeness to the other.

One should note that both mediums can be used interchangeably. Hansel and Gretel can be read out loud and a linguistics lecture can be written down. The difference between the two mediums thus lies in style, function and appropriateness to the context rather than the fact that speech is spoken and writing involves putting pen to paper.

It is important to note that both mediums have great variety within themselves as well as between each other. For example, the language in a copy of Hansel and Gretel is about as different from a note on a fridge door as a conversation at a train station. Hence, one cannot think of the differences between written and spoken language as being static. The differences ought to be thought of as a continuum. This leads implies that some written texts may resemble some spoken texts.

The most common type of speech is an everyday conversation, be it on the telephone, over lunch or on the bus. Speech is used in these situations because of its inherent strengths. Speech can be produced very quickly with rapid adjustments and corrections being made. Most importantly, in conversations, timely response is needed and thus speech is the ideal medium. This responsiveness includes adding new points, restating or exemplifying the previous point, adding qualifications and incorporation of others’ ideas into one’s own discourse. Speech is usually, if not always, accompanied by other forms of communication. These include hand gestures, intonation, pausing, loudness and facial expressions and body gestures. This allows speech to carry more information than if only words were used. Writing typically does not contain these features due to the limitations of writing technology as well as to the very use of writing. Writing tends to be detached from its immediate context as it does not need to be linked to the surroundings of the reader. For example, writing does not require an equivalent of hand gestures, or intonation or any other particular link to the immediate environment of the reader.

That is not to say that writing cannot record these features of language. An example of this is the use of punctuation. Western languages use exclamation marks, question marks and quotation marks as well as other punctuation marks to achieve a sense of intonation and possibly an indication of the writer’s emotions. Still, a usual written texts’ detachment from the context enables the meaning to be conveyed without punctuation. The style of an actual written text makes it so that the reader able to understand the meaning without needing other clues, like and gestures, for meaning.

As human society evolved over the years, writing has become a way of recording ever increasing abstract ideas, notions. Writing gained the ability to pass information to people across both physical distances and time. This has pushed writing further away from speech. Transformation of human society from nomadic hunter-gather to a settled, agricultural society brought the need for recording of information about trade, law and religious rituals. Over time the subject matter of writing has become more abstract. People began to use written text for education and discussion. It became a convention to think of written text as something to be criticised and evaluated.

Today when people think of writing they tend to think of school essays and journalistic articles. These uses of language have a different requirement from speech. These examples of writing require abstraction and generalisation of ideas and events. More precisely, because more time is afforded to the writer than the speaker, by the reader or listener respectively, written text tends to be more packed with information per clause. More nouns, adjectives and relative clauses tend to be used in order to achieve higher rate of information transfer through written text. The written text will usually be read over and over again thus clarity is a requirement. Although speech can be just as clear if not more than writing, because written text can be redrafted, they tend to be clearer and easier to understand. Of course it is common to find incomprehensible written texts (e.g. tax laws). This may be due to the individual writer than the nature of the written text. For example, a very well read university professor may write a text which to him seems perfectly clear while an uneducated youth may look upon the text as if it was written in another language. Indeed to him, the vocabulary, as well as complexity of the issue will be a foreign language even if the fundamental grammar is familiar.

Writing has rarely been speech written down. In the past writing has been used primarily for valued information like religious texts, contracts, treaties and scientific research. The meaning conveyed in written form thus tends to differ from the meaning conveyed through speech.

Although the very nature of the written versus spoken language may be different, the differences may also arise from the fact that each person is different. Socio-economic status, age, life experiences and sex all will affect both the written texts and speech produced. As mentioned before, the differences, being a continuum rather than discrete and clearly defined, means that there will be a great amount of overlapping of written text and spoken text. A written theatrical play may be very close to an everyday conversation while a university lecture may be very close to a textbook. This implies that differences between the two mediums are inherently dependent on circumstances. To put it simply “it all depends”.

In recent years, with the advent of the telephone, radio, television and most importantly digital telecommunication such as mobile phone text messaging and internet based instant messaging (IM), the distinction between writing and speaking is blurring more and more. A typical IM conversation would actually be just like a spoken conversation. The written IM conversation is speeded up with the dropping of double letters and vowels, shortening of words, use of emoticons and, in the latest IM software, even sound and pictures.

There has always been a feedback effect between writing and speaking. In the past the direction of influence was usually the written to the spoken medium because writing has higher social status and thus people want to be as eloquent in their speech as they are, ideally, in the written medium. Today this effect is getting reversed with writing becoming more like speaking since text is becoming more contextualised. It is now more important to interact with the immediate environment and the reader of the text. Of course written and spoken forms of a language will never fully merge because there will always be a need for written accounts, for example, scientific exploration and journalistic prose.

In conclusion writing is more than speech written down; it is something different. That something tends to be abstract and detached because the function of writing is different from that of speech. In the same way speech is not something read out loud. Speech is used for a different function. It is used to interact with the environment and the audience. As Aristotle said “ach kind of rhetoric has its own appropriate style. The style of written prose is not that of spoken oratory”. Time and progress of course has a way of debunking even the smartest of philosophers, and it seems that the very functions of spoken and written language are changing to make the distinction between writing and speaking blurred if not nonexistent.

On Writing

Ideas are the most powerfully creations of men. Ideas send men to the deepest oceans, the highest mountains and inspire infinite other feats. But ideas come from the mind. No one can look into another man’s mind. The only way for an idea to have any influence on anything apart from its creator is for this idea to be communicated to others. A man can tell and show another his ideas. But what exactly one says is usually forgotten, even by the speaker, in a blink of an eye. Speech is not a good way of communicating ideas over vast distances of continents and the even bigger distances of time. To make others know one’s ideas hundreds of centuries after one’s death and in yet undiscovered lands one must write them down.

Writing is an immense challenge. Ideas in a piece of writing may be referring to realities of the writer’s World which are totally alien to the reader. Competency of a writer thus must be judged on whether the reader understands what the writer is trying to say. The most general rule of writing thus must be to make the written text independent of any circumstances and conditions which are particular to the writer. In other words, written work has to be timeless.

This is not denying that some writing may have the purpose of only informing someone who is well aware of the situation and is in close proximity. An SMS text message to a friend saying “I’ll be late” does not require any explanation of why or how or anything else. But this particular area of writing is not concerned with communicating sophisticated ideas. The area of writing we are concerned with is the communication of complex thoughts which inevitably requires the quality of timelessness.

In my experience the method of making a piece of writing timeless can be broken down into 4 parts 3 of which are interrelated:

1) Contents – knowledge of the subject matter
2) Structure of the text
3) Language of the text
4) Peer review – get someone else to read it

The writer must fully know what he is writing about. He must be intimately familiar with all the exceptions, counter arguments and all other aspects of an idea down to the most trivial. If the writer doesn’t have this knowledge then the last three parts of good writing outlined above are useless. This is because the last three parts deal with sculpting knowledge into something other can understand with the use of writing. If the knowledge is not there in the first place, there is nothing to sculpt.

The second part of making a piece of writing good is structure. The writer must have a general plan of his work before he writes the first word. Just like a war leader does not launch an attack without clear understanding of his objectives and the ways of achieving them a writer does not start spewing out sentences in the hope that someone will understand him. A writer must have a plan of how he will lead the reader through to the conclusions the writer wants the reader to have. The actual plan will always be inseparably from the subject matter. No two plans will be identical and in some cases may be utterly different. But in general all good plans of texts will lead the reader to what the writer wants them to be lead to. One of my professors once used an analogy I thought illustrates this concept of structure perfectly. He said that one should make points of explanation in one’s essay seem like links in a strong and heavy chain instead of fragile glass beads on a thin string.

The writer is now ready to write. The writer must not lose track of the fact that he is trying to convey ideas. This means that the language he uses to express these ideas should not hinder the reader from understanding them. Rhetorical garnish can easily obscure the ideas which are being expressed and end up misleading the reader. To avoid this writer must stick to a minimalistic approach. The language used by the writer should be neutral. It should not have a meaning in itself. The meaning is in the content of the text and not in the language used. He must cut out everything that can be cut out. The writer must be on a constant hunt for smaller and simpler words and sentences. This may mean spending hours puzzling over each sentence and trying numerous combinations but it is well worth the effort. However, this zeal to cut may lead the writer to cutting out most of the meaning too. To combat this tendency the writer should keep the text concise but not at the expense of clarity, and keep the text clear but not at the expense of conciseness.

After these efforts the writer may feel that his text is as good as it can be. This may be true but he cannot be a fair judge to this. He must submit his text to review of others. The more people read the text the more mistakes may be pointed out that the writer, who is after all only human, may have missed. Another point is that the writer is ultimately writing for others to read so he needs to make sure that others understand his text.

At the end, only time can say whether a text is well written and achieves the aims of the writer but the guidelines outlined certainly will increase the chances of success of the writer.