Differences Between Speech & Writing

• Speech is time-bound, dynamic, transient. It is part of an interaction in which both participants are usually present, and the speaker has a particular addressee (or several addressees) in mind...
• The spontaneity and seed of most speech exchanges make it difficult to engage in complex advance planning. The pressure to think while talking promotes looser construction, repetition, rephrasing, and comment clause. Intonation and pause divide long utterances into manageable chunks, but sentences boundaries are often unclear.
• Because participants are typically in face-to- face interaction, they can rely on such extralinguistic cues as facial expression and gesture to aid meaning (feedback). The lexicon of speech is often characteristically vague, using words which refer directly to the situation (deictic expressions, such as that one, in here, right now).
• Many words and constructions are characteristic of (especially informal) speech. Lengthy coordinate sentences are normal, and are often of considerable complexity. Nonsense vocabulary is not usually written, and may have no standard spelling. Obscenity may be replaced by graphic euphemism (f***). Slang and grammatical informality, such as contracted forms (isn't, he's) may be frowned upon.
• Speech is very suited to social or 'phatic' functions, such as passing the time of day, or any situation where casual and unplanned discourse is desirable. It is also good at expressing social relationships, and personal opinions and attitudes, due to the vast range of nuances which can be expressed by the prosody and accompanying non-verbal features
• There is an opportunity to rethink an utterance while it is in progress (starting again, adding a qualification). However, errors, once spoken, cannot be withdrawn (the one exception is when a sound engineer performs wonders of auditory plastics surgery on a tape-recording of nonfluent speech); the speaker must live with the consequences. Interruptions and overlapping speech are normal and highly audible.
• Unique features of speech include most of the prosody. The many nuances of intonation, as well as contrast of loudness, tempo, rhythm, and other tones of voice cannot be written down with much efficiency.

• Writing is space-bound, static, permanent. It is the result of a situation in which the writer is usually distant from the reader, and often does not know who the reader is going to be (except in a very vague sense, as in poetry).
• Writing allows repeated reading and close analysis, and promotes the development of careful organization and compact expression, with often intricate sentence structure. Units of discourse (sentences, paragraphs) are usually easy to identify through punctuation and layout.
• Lack of visual contact means that participants cannot rely on context to make their meaning clear; nor is there any immediate feedback. Most writing therefore avoids the use of deictic expressions, which are likely to be ambiguous. Writers must also anticipate the effects of the time-lag between production and reception, and the problems posed by having their language read and interpreted by many recipients in diverse settings.
• Some words and constructions are characteristic of writing, such as multiple instances of subordination in the same sentence, elaborately balanced syntactic patterns, and the long (often multi-page) sentences found in some legal documents. Certain items of vocabulary are never spoken, such as the longer names of chemical compounds.
• Writing is very suited to the recording of facts and the communication of ideas, and to tasks of memory and learning. Written records are easier to keep and scan; tables demonstrate relationships between things; notes and lists provide mnemonics; and text can be red at speeds which suit a person's ability to learn.
• Errors and other perceived inadequacies in our writing can be eliminated in later drafts without the reader ever knowing they were there. Interruptions, if they have occurred while writing, are also invisible in the final product.
• Unique features of writing include pages, lines, capitalization, spatial organization, and several aspects of punctuation. Only a very few graphic conventions relate to prosody, such as question marks and underlining for emphasis. Several written genres (e.g. timetables, graphs, complex
formulae) cannot be read aloud efficiently, but have to be assimilated visually.

- Edited from course notes.