The Differences between Speaking and Writing

The Differences between Speaking and Writing
by Belle Huang（黃月香）


Speaking and writing are both the tools of communication among people, and they are closely related to each other because if a person has a good speaking ability, he or she may also have a good writing ability. However, there are still many differences between speaking and writing, for example, in the ways of their acquisition process, their complexity, and their organization.

Learning to speak is easier than learning to write. People are born to have the ability of speaking, and with the environment of a certain language that people are exposed to, they are able to speak the language. On the contrary, people could only be trained to write, and people are usually taught many writing rules. For example, if a person wants to make his/her writing good, he/she should follow the following four steps: discovering points, developing strong supports for the points, organizing these supports, and revising the written passages to ensure it is a good one. In short, people can write well only by being taught the skill of writing while they can speak well just because they are exposed to the language for a long time.

When two people are talking to each other, they don't need to say a complete sentence because speaking is casual. However, writing needs complete sentences because if a person writes many fragmented sentences in one essay, the whole passage will be in disorder, and it will be hard for readers to follow. Moreover, people are allowed to say many simple sentences to describe a thing or a person in speaking, but they are usually asked to use conjunctions to link simple sentences into complex ones when they are writing. Complex sentences can make the writing briefer, clearer and more formal than speaking. For example, people can say that Mary is a girl, and she is very beautiful, and she is a good student, and she studies very hard, and so on; in contrast, people had better use different sentence patterns in their written passages. They should use complex or compound sentences to make these sentences briefer.

In addition, writing differs greatly from speaking in regard to their organization and grammatical rules. When people speak, they did not pay too much attention to their grammar because they just say simple sentences. The organization of spoken language is also simple, so it is easy for people to speak. On the other hand, written language has a complicated organization. If people write an article, there should be at least three paragraphs, and they should pay more attention to the grammatical structures. For example, the verb tense should be consistent from sentence to sentence, and so are the pronouns.

To sum up, speaking and writing are different in many ways. Speaking is easier to acquire, is less complex, and has less grammatical problems in organization than writing. Therefore, if people want to learn a language, they should learn step by step. After they can speak a language quite well, then, they may learn to write a longer essay, otherwise, they would feel much frustrated in learning writing.

Reference of Pictures:
Speaking
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/?id=2122524&refnum=460341
Writing
http://circe.wikispaces.com/The+Classroom