Speech and Writing

Speech and Writing Features

Speech

• Decoded by the ear
• Transient; ephemeral; impermanent; what is said cannot be captured (unless taped)
• May be spontaneous; unplanned
• Allows interaction and immediate feedback; overlaps and interruptions
• Allows non-verbal signals; gestures and body language
• Unfinished sentences; false starts; hesitations; repetitions
• Interrupted constructions; disjuncture
• May use non-standard grammar
• Contractions (use of elision) eg. can’t; I’ll
• Pauses and fillers eg. er; I mean; sort of
• Colloquial language
• Prosodic features: intonation; stress; pitch; volume
• Mood signals: laughter; silence
• Highly context-bound
• Assumes shared knowledge; deictic expressions eg. over there; that one
• Phatic utterances eg. ‘How’s things?’
• Looser grammatical construction
• Errors remain: what is said cannot be ‘unsaid’
• Accent and dialect may be apparent
• Cohesion/ coherence
• May appear messy and unstructured

Features of Writing

• Decoded by the eye
• Usually planned and revised: reader sees the polished version
• No immediate feedback
• Only the language can signal tone: no prosodic or paralinguistic features
• Permanent and static
• Allows close analysis and repeated reading
• Sentences more complex, more tightly constructed; more subordinate clauses
• Avoids deictic expressions which can be ambiguous (e.g. This book)
• Graphological features
• Distance between writer and reader