Conclusions

The table below summarizes some differences between oral speech, e-chatting and other written genres:

characteristics	oral speech	e-chatting	writing
face-to-face contact	available	unavailable with some substitutes	unavailable
auditory contact	available	unavailable with some substitutes	unavailable
time to formulate thoughts	almost unavailable	almost unavailable	available
characteristics of utterances	loose	loose	well-formed
editing	unavailable	available	available
immediate interactivity	available	available	unavailable
scale	temporal	temporal and spatial	spatial
resources	physical	physical and technical	physical and technical
protracted availability	unavailable	available	available