Just An Idea [Writing Tips]

Speech vs. Writing

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The difference between speaking and writing.

Example (first-person pov.):

Speaking- The worst part about it was I had a friend sitting up here and she’s saying “ha ha”… And I was saying “Go get the police… go! Get someone” I later learned that there are some people who do that in the face of disaster. I mean they just start cracking up as opposed to crying.

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Writing- My helpful friend, perhaps not realizing that I was serious, began laughing. Sue roared all the harder as my situation became more difficult. She claimed I looked funny, clinging there screaming. I realized that she was laughing because she was incapable of acting: the situation must have been greatly disturbing to her, and so she treated it as if it were another situation.

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Do you see the difference there?
Written language is more restricted and generally follows a standardized form of grammar, structure, organization, and vocabulary.

The most notable difference between spoken and written communication is that we generally use spoken communication informally while we use written communication formally. Just consider how you have been taught to talk versus how you have been educated to write. Have you ever turned in a paper to a teacher or an email to your boss that “sounds” like how you talk? Let's hope not.

When we communicate verbally we tolerate mistakes like “should of” rather than “should have” (because it sounds like "should've") and other words or kind of like “uh”, “um”, “you know,” etc. in our speech, but not in our writing. Unless this is how a character in the story talks these should not be in your writing.

Writing is not simply speech written down on paper. It requires instruction and practice because not everyone learns to read and write. Everyone achieves speech eventually. Writing is hard, being a writer is a difficult thing to do honestly. No one always speaks in complete sentences or pronounces the final letter of every word when speaking. In speech, we use simpler sentences connected by lots of "and's" and "but's". Unlike writers, they use more complex sentences with connecting words like "however, who, although", and "in addition".

Also, often when speaking we use our voices (pitch, rhythm, stress) and bodies to communicate what we want to say. Writers can't do that, they rely on the words on the page to express meaning and their ideas. So when we speak the way we do we have immediate responses from our 'audience' who nod, interrupt, question and comment. In writing we only have one opportunity to convey what message we want to 'say', be interesting, informative, hold the reader’s attention and we don't know the reaction of the readers until after we publish.

Writers must consider what and how much their readers need to know about a given topic but when we are talking we can judge the attitudes and feelings of who we speak to by their verbal and non-verbal reactions. When you are writing you must use correct punctuation and spelling to communicate exactly how you want the reader to read and understand your work. That is how you create a pause and help pronounce the right words.

Although an advantage in writing is that most writing is planned and can be changed through editing and revision before an audience reads it, in most cases when we speak it is spontaneously and unplanned.

However, both spoken and written dialects are linked to the social background, age, race, and gender of the writer, speaker, and 'audience'. Depending on the people we are dealing with, and what we are discussing we can switch between formal and informal ways of communicating in the grammatically correct way.