Spoken Language and Written Language

This afternoon, it's my colleague's turn to give a lecture on the differences between the features of spoken and written language. By all means, spoken form and written form of language are very different in terms of mode of delivery and uses in various contexts of communication. However, scholarly research on writing has long been developed; whereas spoken discourse has just been explored since the last four decades of the 20th century.

Sure, my colleague, An, is always good at giving lively and stimulating lectures on discourse analysis as it is one of her research and teaching areas. She quoted a very good example to illustrate why spoken and written discourse are so different by using an example of her students who used to ask her a very interesting question:

'Dr. He, in the tutorial, you had a very high opinion of my oral presentation, but why you found out so many problems in my draft version when I sent it to you for comments.'

Then, An explained to all students in the lecture theatre: 'Yes, it's always easy to present a paper or a drafted version of an assignment verbally since there is so much visual and audio support to help convey the message, so to speak, resulting in better and more productive delivery of the presentation. However, when it comes down to written discourse, the draft is "alone", without any contextual clues or paralinguistic features to make its meaning explicit and clear to its readers! That's why writing is far more cognitively demanding than speaking in terms of transmission of information.'

I particularly like this example as writing is much more demanding than speaking. Writers have to make sure every word and every idea he/she put down on paper is relevant and sensible to readers who only read the text instead of seeing or meeting the writers face-to-face. Every single idea must be understandable and interpretable to others who are far and remote from the writers in time and space. An then concluded by saying 'Speaking is a process which is constantly happening and writing is a product which existed physically.'