Teaching Writing

Writing and speaking as productive skills

The differences between written and spoken English imply various types of exercises which focus on different aspects of language and demand different levels of correctness.

Perhaps the single most important difference between writing and speaking, which are productive skills, concerns the need for accuracy. Speakers constantly make 'mistakes' when they are speaking. They hesitate and say the same things in different ways and they often change the subject of what they are saying in mid-sentence. Except in extremely formal situations this is considered normal and acceptable linguistic behaviour. A piece of writing, however, with mistakes and half-finished sentences, would be judged by many speakers as illiterate since it is expected that writing should be 'correct'. From the point of view of language teaching, therefore, there is often far greater pressure for written accuracy than there is for accuracy in speaking.

The writer also suffers from the disadvantage of not getting immediate feedback from the reader - and sometimes getting no feedback at all. Writers cannot use intonation or stress, and facial expression, gesture and body-movement are denied them. These disadvantages have to be compensated for by greater clarity and by the use of grammatical and stylistic techniques for focusing attention on main points. Perhaps most importantly there is a greater need for logical organisation in a piece of writing than there is in a conversation, for the reader has to understand what has been written without asking for clarification or relying on the writer's tone of voice or expression.