Chapter 9 Speaking and Writing
The previous eight chapters have focused on writing and research. While writing and researching are important academic skills, speaking is equally important. Spoken and written arguments are in many ways the same: both articulate positions in an assertive voice, both are organized according to purpose, and both present evidence based on the expectations of an audience. The main difference between spoken and written arguments is not what your ideas are but how you convey them.
- The obvious difference (excluding the modern inventions of radio, telephones, and television): written language allows people to communicate across time and space, while spoken language happens immediately and is available only for those who can hear it (or see it, in the case of sign languages).
- Virtually every human being learns to speak, while literacy is far less common. Today, almost 17% of adults around the world are illiterate.
- Because reading and writing are consciously learned behaviors while the ability to speak is acquired naturally, many scientists and linguists think that spoken language is innate and written language is a human construct.
- Spoken and signed languages can have varieties and dialects, while written language is generally more regulated and standardized.
- Writing and speaking appear to use different parts of the brain.
Differences in Dialectal/Cultural Rules.
Communication extends far beyond the grammatical features used by a speaker or writer. A person’s grammar may be technically correct, but the meaning of their words can provoke anger, laughter, misunderstanding, or outright confusion. Since language revolves around context, knowing the context in which you speak or write is essential to producing culturally appropriate messages. In linguistics, the study of these cultural and contextual language rules is called pragmatics.
Consider this example: You’ve decided to take your six-year-old cousin to the park for a picnic. You notice that a woman nearby is very pregnant. Your cousin also notices the person’s large belly and decides to walk up to her and say, “Wow! You must have eaten a lot of treats!” Although your cousin’s sentence is grammatically correct, they have made the significant English pragmatic mistake of talking about someone’s body and consumption. Maybe your young cousin heard their parent say this same sentence to the robust family dog but has not yet learned that speaking to humans in such a way is inappropriate.
Another example would be one of pragmatic differences between languages: a Caribbean student studying in the United States turns in a narrative and receives a low grade. The teacher’s comments point to the sequence of events within the narrative. However, what the teacher sees as unorganized and illogical is actually a culturally distinct method of storytelling that is different from the standard method (see Subsection 6.3.1) uses.
Here are some more pragmatic facts:
- Other examples of pragmatic knowledge include knowing how and when to take turns speaking, make eye contact, and ask questions.
- Other types of pragmatic knowledge include contributing relevant information to a conversation that is not redundant and adjusting the type of language based on the conversational situation.
- Things like eye contact, head nodding, personal space, and amount of touching are also part of the pragmatics of a language and vary by language and culture.
- There are three main aspects of communication that are essential to understanding the pragmatic situation of a conversation: 1) the literal meaning of what was spoken (locution), 2) the speaker’s intentions (illocution), and 3) the listener’s interpretation (perlocution).
- Pragmatics is one major reason why it has been so difficult to program computers to speak and understand language. Try telling a robot to “crack a window,” and see what happens!
