Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

1 Preliminaries

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Writing your text

Writing is such a fundamental aspect of contemporary Western society that we may forget that it is a relatively recent invention (at least in terms of the entire evolutionary development of humankind). Whereas we are fairly sure that spoken language dates back hundreds of thousands of years, written lan guage did not start to emerge until 8,000 years ago, with the origins of alpha betic writing being only some 5,000 years ago. There are still many ‘primary oral’ societies in today’s world that do not have a writing system. Writing can be seen as having arisen at various times and in various places as a system for transcribing speech into visible form; speech is thus historically more basic than writing. Yet this observation should not mislead you into thinking that the kind of English that is appropriate for speaking is directly transferable to the written medium. This is because the situations in which it is appropriate to write down your thoughts are typically different from those in which you use the spoken language. This has immediate consequences for the kind of language that you can use when writing. Here is an overview of the features of speak ing and writing situations: • Speaking • Writing face-to-face interaction physical and temporal distance familiarity unfamiliarity intonation and accent syntactic and textual organization Let us consider each of these contrasts in more detail and their consequences for the practice of writing. Speaking typically occurs when both the communicator and the address ee(s) are in the same physical environment (in face-to-face interaction) at the same time. The degree of formality of the interaction may differ enormously – think of the difference between a chat at a party and a papal audience – but what remains common to every dialogue is that there is a continual inter change of speaker and hearer roles. No matter how many participants there are in the conversation, you will be aware when you are speaking that each of the other participants is a potential next communicator, and you will organ ize your participation in the conversation so as to achieve a balance between ‘keeping the floor’ (i.e. not being interrupted) and eliciting reactions from your addressees, for example by asking a question or commenting on what they have said. Face-to-face interaction versus physical and temporal distance

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