And welcome to this video about spoken and written communication. Have you ever come across a situation something like this? Someone comes up to you and says, firstly, there is no doubt in my mind that some people's speaking practices are more like written communication than oral communication. Did you get that? It's probably difficult to follow. That's because this person is speaking more like written communication. If you were to speak it in a normal speaking practice, he would say something like this. Some people talk like they write. Notice the difference? Well, by the end of this video, you will. You will be able to identify the differences between spoken and written Business communication. Written communication tends to be planned, organized, it's one-way. It's a lot different than spoken communication, which tends to be unplanned, although not always. It's less structured and quite often it's interactive. It can be one-way, such as in a business presentation, but it also can be two-way, interactive. So let's take a look at a comparison, another comparison, just to see the differences. Let's say you hear someone say, You know the staff retreat we go to every year? You know, where the managers project the profits for the following year? It's next week. Let's hear another version. Our company's annual staff retreat is next week. During this time, we will discuss management's financial projections for the coming year. Let's take a look at the two a little bit more closely. Some of the differences you might notice are repetition. [COUGH] When we speak, we tend to repeat a little bit. So in the first example, you might see, you know, you know, twice. A lot depends on the purpose, the audience, the genre, and the medium and mode of communication. Remember, we talked about medium and mode of communication in week one of this course. You need to change the way you speak or write based on these elements. Of course, sometimes things might differ. Can you guess what kind of genre or medium this communication might occur? Next week is our company's annual staff retreat- I'm sure you'll remember. At the retreat, we'll discuss financial projections for the coming year. This actually has a combination of both spoken and written. That's because it's an email. Email communication quite often combines some conversational elements. And you'll see things like, I'm sure you'll remember, things that won't appear, really, these type of interactive phrases that won't appear in written. So what are differences then? Well, in spoken, there's stressing and pausinging. We use stressing and pausing to emphasize what we wanna say. This will come up in another course lecture focusing on spoken discourse. And we'll teach you how you can make use of stressing and pausing to emphasize a particular point. In writing, this is done with the use of punctuation, full stops, exclamation marks, question marks, commas, dashes. All of these can have a similar effect to stressing and pausing in spoken English. Quite often when we speak, we speak with words with fewer syllables. It's easier to interpret, it's easier to take in and understand. Whereas in written communication, you'll see more complex words, more syllables, words that are nominalized, meaning they're turned into nouns. We'll talk about normalization in the writing course. We tend to speak in chunks of meaning, perhaps not always in full sentences. You'll notice perhaps even in this lecture, I might pause in the middle of a sentence and start a new sentence without finishing a previous sentence. I might make a grammatical mistake and correct myself, and then continue on. These are common features of spoken English, and therefore we need to reorganize how we give meaning differently. So we put ideas into units, or chunks of meaning, whereas in written discourse and written language, it's more complex, you see more complex sentences. Of course, these will vary depending on the genre. Then, there's also the rhythm, right. And this is related to stress and pausing, but it's also about the speed to which you're speaking. So you might change the rhythm if you want to emphasize something. If I want to make you understand what I'm trying to say, I might slow down. If I start talking about things that aren't as important, but then I wanna get to something that is, notice I change the speed of my speech. Rhythm is also used in written language, but this is used with sentence variety. You might have a variety of complex with simple, shorter sentences to emphasize a certain idea. So these are the main differences that you should be aware of when you're conversing or passing on messages within different modes of communication, whether it's spoken or written. So now you should have an idea, and you should be able to identify the differences between spoken and written communication.
