[Air-l] question for the list: who coined "talk/write"?

Elizabeth Maurer emaurer at shaw.ca
Thu Mar 23 20:25:46 PST 2006


Hi Andrea,
It seems to me that many who look at online sociality operate on the
assumption that CMC is a kind of hybrid of writing and speech.  In the
work I'm doing on "netiquette," I find that users themselves tend toward
this attitude as well, though with very interesting inconsistencies. 

In terms of *early* scholars who addressed the writing/speech overlap
from a linguistic perspective, you might look at the three articles
below by Collot and Belmore, Ferrara et al, and Denise Murray.  Ferrara
et al. argue that synchronous chat, what they call "Interactive Written
Discourse," is a hybrid of speech and writing.  Collot and Belmore say
the same about asynchronous Bulletin board postings, which they call
"Electronic language."  Dieter Stein has also done some work using on
turn-taking in chat that may help you (no reference handy at this
computer, sorry!)

That said, these are all linguistic approaches to the writing/speech
question.  Those dealing with questions of genre will approach the
writing/speech question from another angle.

Collot, Milena and Nancy Belmore. "Electronic Language: A New Variety of
English." International Conference on English Language Research on
Computerized Corpora. Ed. Jan Aarts, Pieter de Haan and Nelleke
Oostdijk. Nijmegen: Rodopi, 1992. 41-55.

Ferrara, K., H. Brunner, and G. Whittemore. "Interactive Written
Discourse as an Emergent Register." Written Communication 8.1 (1991):
8-34.

Murray, D.E. "The Composing Process for Computer Conversation." Written
Communication 8.1 (1991): 35-55. 

Hope this helps,

Elizabeth Maurer



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