Spoken language and writing are different from one another in multiple ways. Speech is an ability that is learned from an early age, it comes naturally to us. Author Dylan B. Dryer stated that “speech is natural in the sense that as modern homo sapiens, we’ve been speaking to one another for nearly two hundred thousand years” Dryer, the author of Writing is Not Natural quoted. Writing, on the other hand, is something that is taught. There are multiple different things that you can do with writing that simply cannot be done with speech and vice versa.
Written language is much more complex than spoken language. When writing, it is good to write with complex sentences because it can add more details and make the writing more interesting. However, if you speak in complex sentences, it will be harder to pay attention for the listener and the listener will become bored. The article “Differences Between Writing and Speech” talks about how things like punctuation, layouts, headings, colors, fonts, and many other effects are only possible for writing. Writing is something that can be read and analyzed repeatedly. The only way this is done for speech is when it is recorded. Word choice is something that speech and writing differ on. When writing, it is important to choose your words carefully whereas speech, does not have as great of importance. As long as you can make your point, the word choice does not matter.
“Speech is natural in the sense that as modern homo sapiens, we’ve been speaking to one another for nearly two hundred thousand years”
For speech, it is common for incomplete sentences, repetition, corrections, and interruptions. When you are speaking to someone, they might not have listened to you close enough causing you to repeat a small part or all of what you said. Repetition is something that we want to avoid when writing. It can make the reader bored and not interested. When we speak, we get immediate feedback unlike when writing as well. Spoken language also makes it easier to portray emotions. You simply change the tone of your voice, the volume in which you speak, and the timbre. Even though you can portray emotion in written language, it does not come as naturally and you cannot change the volume when writing. Furthermore, certain vocabulary words are mainly used with spoken language. These words are called slang words. Some examples are “my bad” or “y’know”. Slang words, however, are used in very few writing formats like in text messages for example.
Overall, many things make written language and spoken language so diverse from one another. Things like complexity and other qualities that one has that the other doesn’t. I never would have thought they would be so different from each other.
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/growth-strategies/2017/04/3-critical-differences-between-writing-and.html
https://omniglot.com/writing/writingvspeech.htm
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