Differences between Speaking and Writing and Their Implications for Teaching

Abstract

During the past two years (1978-80), while working on the Haber Oral Biography Project for the Michigan Historical Collections, I had access to fifty-two hours of taped interviews and fifteen hundred pages of edited transcripts. The interviews had been taped in 1977 to provide a record of Professor William Haber's recollections for use by historians, economists, and other scholars; transcripts of the tapes were being turned into a finished text. Because the transcripts had gone through four readings by two experienced editors,1 the editorial markings and changes offered an extraordinary opportunity to analyze the ways in which spoken discourse is restructured, rephrased, reworded, spelled, and punctuated to compensate for the loss of the situational and expressive supports of speech. As I examined the transcripts, I discovered that in converting the speech on the tapes to writing in the text, the editors had been addressing many of the problems I observed in the writing of my college students. This coincidence suggested, first, that my students were unconsciously transferring their knowledge of the spoken code to the written and, second, that they were unaware that the processes, requirements, and conventions of writing differ substantially from those of speaking. I thought that if I could categorize and understand the editorial changes in the transcripts, I would be better able to help my students consciously adapt their practiced facility with speech to their writing.