Comparison-Contrast - The Differences Between Speaking and Writing

Speaking and writing are both the tools of communicating among people. In addition, writing is closely linked with speaking because if a person has a good speaking ability, that one may also have good writing ability. However, there are still many differences between speaking and writing, for example, in the ways of acquisition, their complexity, and their organization.

Learning to speak is easier than learning to write. People are born to have the ability of speaking, and with the environment of a certain language that people are exposed to, they are able to speak that kind of language. On the contrary, people could only be trained to write, and people are usually taught many writing rules. For example, if a person wants to make his/her writing good, then he/she should follow the following four steps: discovering points, developing strong support for the points, organizing these points, and revising the written passages to ensure it is a good one. In short, people can write well only by being taught the skill of writing while they can speak well just because they are exposed to the language for a long time.

When two people are talking to each other, they can speak lots of fragment sentences and they don’t need to say a complete sentence because speaking is casual. However, writing needs complete sentences because if a person writes many fragment sentences in one essay, the whole passage will be in disorder, and it will not be easy for readers to follow. Whereas people are allowed to say many simple sentences to describe a thing or a person in speaking, people are usually asked to use transitions to link simple sentences into one or two complex sentence when they are writing. Complex sentences can make the writing briefer, clearer and more formal than speaking. For example, people can say that Mary is a girl, and she is very beautiful, and she is a good student, and she studies very hard, and so on; in contrast, people can’t write these run-on and simple sentences in their written passages, and they should use complex or compound sentences to make these sentences briefer.

In addition, speaking differs from writing in regard to their organization for speaking has less grammatical problems than writing does. When people speak, they seldom have problems of grammar because they just say simple sentences. The organization of spoken language is uncomplicated, so it is easy for people to speak without grammatical problems. On the other hand, written language has a complicated organization. If people write an article, there should be at least three paragraphs, and it will have more grammatical problems. For example, the verb tense should be consistent from one paragraph to another, and so are the pronouns.

To sum up, speaking and writing have differences in many ways. For example, speaking is easier to acquire, is less complex, and has less grammatical problems in organization than writing. Therefore, if people want to learn a language well, they should learn step by step. After they can speak to a certain level, then, they may start to learn writing, or they will have lots of frustrations in learning writing.