Comparing Speech and Writing
One of the goals of this course is to look at writing as a medium even as we look through it to meaning, to use Richard Lanham's phrasing (see The Electronic Word). In your own writing for the World Wide Web, I hope that this oscillation between looking at and looking through will result in a process of composing and learning in which "the medium of the text is not simply taken as a given, something to be worked within" (McGann 128). Rather, the medium will become "part of the scene of writing, part of the imagination's subject" (McGann 128).
To facilitate that transformation, we have been studying the ways in which speech and writing relate to one another, particularly the ways in which writing exploits the opportunities afforded by visual media. We have considered the relationship between speech and writing under several heads (links from this list lead to four pages containing notes from class lectures on these topics):
- Systems of Communication
- Writing as one means of linguistic communication based on particular form of language and a particular sensory channel. From this perspective, we relate writing to systems of communication that are more limited in scope and that employ other sensory channels.
- Basic Structures of Speech and Writing
- Assuming that "full writing" is structurally mapped onto spoken language, we considered the basic structures of speech and writing involved in such mapping.
- Mapping of Writing to Speech
- We noted that partial and full writing systems can be--and have been--mapped to various "levels" of language.
- Differences between Writing and Speech
- While it is essential to understand how full writing is mapped onto speech at some phonetic level, we have been most interested in this course in understanding how writing is different from speech, how it exploits the affordances of its visual media.
Return to syllabus.