Speech versus writing

Speech and writing differ in a number of ways. Consider the following spoken dialogue:

Speaker A: But the point is she's not such a strong character.

Speaker B: It's not the point she's as sir..she's stronger than what she makes out I'll tell you now.

Speaker A: Well maybe.

Speaker B: She's a lot stronger cos otherwise I would have drived her mad when she lived here but no she's a lot stronger than what she makes out to you lot I'll tell you that now.

The talk is shared between two people. They both assume some mutual knowledge, so we never hear who she is, or where here is located. It's repetitive: speaker В keeps stressing how strong she is. It's not composed purely of sentences: the fragment Well maybe' is treated as a complete utterance. The verbs are all active ones (tell, drive, and so on), and the sentence structures are fairly straightfor­ward. The vocabulary consists mostly of common words, with some colloquial phrases {drive mad, I'll tell you that).

Now look at a passage from a quality newspaper on a similar theme:

Assertiveness problems are pervasive. For example, marital dis­content can arise from the inability of partners to talk assertively about their problems. Instead they tend to bottle up feelings, which inevitably leads to hostility. Marital violence also occurs more frequently in men

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low in assertiveness and may be explained by their inability to be assertive as opposed to aggressive.

The uninterrupted flow of words is written by a single author. It is fully explicit, in that it does not refer to unexplained people or places. The only repetition is the occasional re-use of key words, such as assertiveness, inability. The passage contains only complete sen­tences. There is a passive verb may be explained by, and the sentence structures are relatively complex, with several embeddings (sen­tences one inside another, Chapter 7), as in inability of partners to talk, tend to bottle up, which inevitably leads. There is a spate of abstract nouns: assertiveness, inability, discontent, violence, hostility, and sev­eral lexical items are of fairly low frequency: marital, pervasive.

These passages contain fairly typical differences between spoken and written language. They can be summed up on the following table:

Spoken	Written
More than one participant	Single writer
Inexplicit	Explicit
Repetitive	Non-repetitive
Fragments	Full sentences
Simple structure	Elaborate structure
Concrete, common vocabulary	Abstract, less common vocabulary

Fig. 47

Several of these features overlap with the informality-formality scale, with speech containing informal features, and written language formal ones. Consequently, formal speech has quite a lot in common with informal writing. Readable writers are sometimes said to be those who 'write as they talk' - though this is usually an illusion and apparent effortless spontaneity is often carefully crafted.

But the important point is this: spoken language typically involves the characteristics in the left-hand column of Figure 47, and written language those in the right-hand column - though each can borrow from the other. There is no hard and fast divide. A sermon is likely to have more 'written' characteristics than a chat between friends in a pub. One is not 'better' than the other, each is appropriate in certain circumstances. Written language is sometimes wrongly thought of as an ideal model for speech. In practice, those who reproduce written language when they speak sound quite odd. Occasionally, recent immigrants are regarded as pompous pedants, primarily because they may have painstakingly learned English from books.

Spoken and written characteristics, then, are another facet of

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speech styles which efficient speakers and writers control with ease. A further facet will be discussed in the next section.