Writing VS Speaking

Hello!

I want to comment on my professor's post about communication through writing.

Could you please check it?

The Professor: Texting is a brilliant way to miscommunicate how you feel, and misinterpret what other people mean.

My comment: I have to respectfully disagree with you. First of all, either we choose to communicate by writing or via speaking, I think each has their own signs, symbols or devices to make communication more effective. It is true that in face-to-face communications, as speakers and/or listeners, we use quite a lot of expressions and gestures, as well as stress and intonation, to convey meaning. To be more specific, we embody/embellish our speech by varying the tone or speed of what we are saying, or fill our conversation with dramatic pauses if we want to. For example, we shout or we whisper. These paralinguistic features such as body language and the ways we use our voices might be fewer/less or even none in writing than when there are in speech; however, what I believe is that writing can be just as powerful. Take question marks and exclamation marks in the first place for example, they can perfectly, I find, transform the product of what is written. To be clearer, ‘ 1. You are cold. 2. You are cold? 3. You are cold! or even You are cold!!!‘

Also, by changing the order of sentences we can change meaning and convey nuance in a quite different way. I met her at a café. or At a café I met her. or Her I met at a café.

Apart from this, underlining to make something distinguished, or italics to show how surprised we are can be mentioned in that way.

More importantly, people use a variety of emoticons or smileys for expressing more meaning and nuance if they feel their sentence is potentially ambiguous. Therefore, :- ) shows a smile and that the message doesn’t need to be taken in a serious way, as in

You must be stupid. : -)

or : -( is for sadness, as in

Sorry I can’t make it tonight. : -(

To sum things up, I don’t think that texting destroys what I want to get across exactly in my daily life. I think that whilst we are speaking we have a chance actually to question or interrupt so we can always change the messages being given out. On the other hand, our writings generally turn up as a finished work. Because of these reasons, while we can be enormously tolerant of error (for example when the speaker stumbles or retells a story using completely different words) when talking and listening to someone, we might not show the same kindness when it comes to the written form.