Mediaboss Marketing

When we consider speech and writing, its clear which we think of as the lesser art. Talk is cheap, chatter idle; get it in writing, we say. But in his new book from Oxford University Press, Vernacular Eloquence, Peter Elbow (the author of the classic writing books Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) successfully challenges the assumption that writing is always better than speech. In fact, Elbow argues that the best way to free our pens is to unleash our tongues.

According to Elbow, our spoken language, through much practice (even prodigies start speaking well before they start writing, after all), effortlessly embodies virtues that we struggle to achieve in writing. For most people, unless youre another Dickens or Trollope, the daily ratio of speaking to writing is skewed wildly in the direction of speechso why not bring the strength of our experience in one mode to bear on the other? Our spoken language tends to be more direct, with fewer convoluted constructions and subordinate clauses and yet more naturally varied and interesting sentences. Speech gets to the point faster, and connects better with the audience. The intonation and phrasing of our speech elegantly map the patterns of meaning we want to convey, in ways that we may not be able to achieve on the page.

Read the original:
The Word - Write it like you’d say it