Major differences between spoken and written language may be summarized as follows:
- absence or presence of a face-to-face visual contact (and hence — absence or presence of non-verbal visual communication which is or is not going on concurrently with verbal communication; there are also other consequences associated with this point);
- absence or presence of auditory contact (which provides much information both about the speaker and the true meaning of his utterances, as well as about the environment in which the conversation is taking place: “chairs creaking, buses going past, the scratch of a match lighting a cigarette”2);
- time to formulate thoughts (usually available in case of writing and lacking in case of spontaneous oral speech2);
- intrinsic characteristics of spontaneous speech (redundant information, lexical repetitions, intensifiers, self-corrections, false starts, hesitation fillers, pause-fillers, theme openers, interactive fillers, comment clauses, loose structures rather than sentences, etc.) and well-formedness of written language;
- editing (available for writing; partly available for oral speech: a speaker may correct but cannot entirely eliminate his mistakes);
- immediate feedback, interactivity (usually attributed to oral speech; not available for the majority of written genres);
- time vs. space (while oral speech unfolds in time, writing is usually spatial, thus a reader may re-read a sentence in case of necessity, but generally cannot get immediate answers from the author; the situation is opposite in case of oral speech);
- skills necessary to produce and perceive oral speech and written language;
- physical and technical resources used for the production and perception of oral and written language;
- evanescence of speech and the protracted availability of writing3;
- neurophysiological mechanisms underlying oral and written language.
Now that major differences between spoken and written language in general have been pointed out, it would be reasonable to consider each of the aforementioned points in greater detail, concentrating this time on the actual differences between spontaneous oral speech and spontaneous written e-chatting.
Footnotes:
2Brown, G., Yule, G. (1983). Discourse Analysis, Cambridge University Press, page 9.
3 “Written language differs in significant ways from spoken language; the way most directly related to the physical existence of writing is the evanescence of speech versus the protracted availability of writing.” (Daniels, P.T., Writing Systems. In: The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishing, 2001).