Spoken English Guidelines
Spoken English Guidelines
Spoken English Guidelines
Spelling
English alphabetical representation is anything but a transparent representation of speech.
Our spellings owe much to the spoken language of the past; the written form bears the scars
of history. These differences are maintained in the language, since they increase the labour
required to enter the power structures of writing.
Noah Webster simplified the spelling system in a situation where there were many learners of
English as a second language, and a keen political desire to break with the colonial past. But
he did not go so far as to make writing look like speech. To do so is to provoke parody, as in
the work of Josh Billings (in Crystal).
Fillers
Since speech is produced in real time, it requires that time be occupied if one is to keep the
floor. We thus find spoken language more likely to include fillers like I mean, sort of, you
know, you see. There is also much repetition of information, not particularly to make sure
the message is understood but to fill out the space of interaction. By talking, we care for each
other; we express and maintain solidarity. This filling out of space would seem less likely to
concern writing.
Back-channeling
To the extent that speech implies mutual presence, it allows for significant back-channeling,
here understood as a general term for all the a-ahs, yeahss, head-nodding and the like by
which a listener indicates that they are participating in the conversation.
Marked incompletion
In speech, sentences are left incomplete; space is left for the other to participate, to affirm, to
nod. In writing, this might be represented as points of suspension.
Overlapping turns
In speech, interruption is possible, which means there are also many strategies for avoiding
interruptions. These include keep speaking regardless, speaking louder, using non-verbal
means changing the tone of voice.
Fine-tuning of register and domain allocation
The entire suprasegmental level allows spoken language a range of regional and social
variations that is not available to written language.
Contractions
These concern verbs in English: cant (cannot), neednt,
BUT NOT maynt,
Informal vs formal lexical items
maybe vs perhaps
get vs become
Coordination vs subordination
This would also concern the absolute length of noun phrases.
Presence of first and second persons
In theory, the first and second persons are less prominent in the written mode. Formality in
many cultures involves a shift to the third person.
The Dissolution of Differences
There are several reasons why these differences are not always clear:
1.
2.
3.
4.
S1: my name's Tom Lehker and i'm a staff member at the Career
Planning and Placement office. uh this is a program we hav- as far
as i know we have never done before, um we're co-sponsoring it
with Rackham, um uh the idea of sort of what it means to be a
faculty member as a panel really came from students at some of the
other events that we had, um as we would collect our student
evaluations which i'll have you fill out at the end of this program.
one of the events that students talked about having was something
that really, gave faculty a chance to talk about. issues of of faculty
culture or faculty roles, um expectations of junior faculty and how
those expectations might, um change as a faculty member, uh
progresses through a career, um, maybe some of the myths, um
myths and or realities that graduate students had, i'm hearing from
a lot of graduate students they just didn't hear much from, uh their
advisors and other faculty members about what it really did mean to
be a faculty member. so we uh decided to do this type of panel to
start to address some of those kind of issues. partly knowing that
many of these issues are very specific to the individual student or
also possibly very discipline-specific. so i think that's one of the
limitations that we acknowledge going into something like this, is
that we're hoping that the panelists um can speak sort of as
generally as possible but also knowing that they will always speak,
from the framework of their own, um process that they went
through. um, let me just say a couple things sort of administratively
before we get started, and one is to say up front that we were
supposed to have three panelists today. but i got a call from
Professor Rose from the history department literally about an hour
ago, she could hardly speak, and said she was too ill to attend. uh
but we're left uh with two uh very fine panelists, we'll have um,
Farnam Ja- Jahanian, um from the EECS department up in
engineering, and also Professor Dickerso- um, Glenda Dickerson,
who's also, in the theater department and also an associate dean
here at Rackham.
S2: and is making her stage entrance <SS LAUGH>
SU-F: (it's very nice)
S1: on cue. we're just getting started.
S4: good.
S1: um, and so the idea of this panel will be that um um, both of the
panelists will speak for some amount of time, ten fifteen minutes uh
potentially longer if you like given that we're we're short one
panelist today, um i gave them some questions that they might
want to think about along the lines as i was outlining earlier but
then also hoping that question and answer which i always think is is
always very helpful in this type of setting. um and so in just a
minute i will turn it over to them, i am gonna pass out a couple
things, the first is, program evaluation if you could take just a couple
of minutes at the end of the program and fill that out. um again it's
the evaluations in past years that have led to events like this so we
really do take, your feedback seriously. the other, is just a clipboard,
if you could also, sign in. uh, we like to, keep a record of who
attends these programs it helps us to, justify our, existence, uh for
things like this. so i think that was all, i wanted to say i think maybe
if the panelists wanna come up now we haven't talked about an
order for who would like to go first so you can, flip a coin or
S2: could i ask a question before we get started?
S1: sure.
S2: i was just wondering if you could raise your hands if you're, here
because you're not sure if you wanna be a faculty member that you
might be interested in a nonacademic career... okay, thank you.
<P :05>