Yet Another Reason That Writing Is Hard

The challenge of using only the written word

Barbara: It occurs to me that writers have a major handicap. We are swimming in a world of oral language, but, as writers, we only have the written word to work with. The difference between spoken and written language is vast.

Oral language has a major, additional component: prosody — sometimes called ‘the music of language.’ An enormous amount of communication is not with words alone but also through tone, pitch, pacing, emphasis, rise in the voice at the end of a sentence…

And then there are non-verbal ways that we communicate, including through facial expression, gesture, body tension… And, as writers, we don’t get to use any of these!

Elizabeth: I’m used to thinking about the advantages of written communication: everyone reads the same word; it allows for the wide dissemination of knowledge; there is a document that doesn’t change. But if I think of actors performing a script, I can see the advantage of the oral word. The actors have so many ways to alter the impact and import of the words on the page. It’s another whole layer, another set of tools.

Barbara: Right. With written language we are really hampered. We have to actually describe the non-verbal elements (as in, “he said, snidely while looking over his shoulder”), which can be cumbersome and takes a lot of words. But, the closest we come to prosody in a written document is a comma that says “pause,” a period that says “stop,” a colon that says something is coming, and a question mark that asks. And then we have italics and “screaming” capitalization.

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Elizabeth: Speaking of ‘italics,’ I’ve observed that in our posts you and I tend to use italics to emphasize certain words. I don’t normally do this. I think we resort to italics in an effort to capture the emphasis we communicate to one another with our voices.

What about poetry? It uses rhythm and sometimes rhyme, repetition, non-prose-like sentence structure or appearance on the page. It uses myriad ways to suggest layers of meaning and emotion in a not-direct way.

Take “not-direct.” I also considered indirect and NOT-direct. A simple ‘indirect’ would have been fine for the purpose, but it didn’t go far enough. I wanted to point to the fact that poetry often makes use of a word specifically because it isn’t the obvious one. It’s a technique for focusing attention or expressing more than the expected word can. I ended up resorting to a poetic device, however awkward.

Barbara: Deconstructing the process you went through to end up with a made-up word is a tiny demonstration of the limitations of written language. Poetry allows more innovation and gets closest to capturing prosodic elements.

When you stop to think about it, writers need all the help they can get. It’s so easy for written words to be misunderstood. You write something and put it out into the world. Readers likely impose prosodic elements in their own minds as they read the words. And what they receive may well not be what you intended.

Elizabeth: There’s no way to avoid it. You can keep the imaginary reader in your mind at every moment, but you can’t control what that other person will make of your words.

Barbara: By the way, this has application to the experience of reading versus listening to a book. Many people prefer one or the other and tell me they’re swayed by how easy or hard it is for them to pay attention to each. But some people also don’t want someone “reading to them” because that person is interpreting the text! That’s what oral language imposes on the written word.

Elizabeth: You have to accept that once you publish something, you give up all control over how it’s construed. Perhaps some writers enjoy that idea, the way many visual artists avoid putting their intentions into words, so as not to limit the new meanings viewers might find in their work.

If though, like me, you really want to be understood as you intend, then you have to contend with the fact that words themselves are so imprecise. This is why finding the right one is so important — and such a challenge. Every written word is a choice — with implications. Instead of writing , “poetry uses … a not-direct way,” I could have written ‘purposefully indirect way’ or ‘unconventional way’ or, best of all, ‘unexpected way.’ I should have!

Barbara: Well, we need language that is imprecise. If we had specific words for everything we wanted to say, we'd have millions of words too many to remember. The article from the journal Nature that we talked about in another post said that a language with very precise words would be “unlearnable!”

What compensates for this imprecision of word-meaning is the flexibility it offers. A single word, in different forms and in a sentence with other words, can be pushed to express a great range of meanings. Plus in oral communication, you have prosody.

It’s mind-boggling how all of these elements of communication operate so beautifully together. Words, grammar, prosody, gesture, facial expression.

Elizabeth: Barbara, why am I getting the idea that you’re about to tell me something about how the brain does this?

Barbara: Well, we’re a long way from knowing everything about this. But we actually do know a lot about the neurological basis of language. We have learned a lot from what physicians call “natural experiments,” what the late neurologist, Ken Heilman, called “whispers of nature.”

For example, there are various brain disturbances that affect one aspect of language and not others. A stroke in a certain part of the brain will leave a person unable to read but still able to write! A stroke in another area of the brain will make the individual unable to comprehend language while their expressive language is fine.

There is a well-known story about a teacher who had a stroke from which she seemed to have fully recovered. However, after returning to work she was no longer able to control her classroom. Can you guess what was the matter?

Well, she actually had not fully recovered, although her enduring deficit was not obvious. She had lost the ability to utilize emotional prosody. So, when she said, “Stop it!” to her students, they did not know that she “MEANT IT!”

Elizabeth: That’s a great story.

Barbara: Ken Heilman told another interesting one about a different kind of disturbance related to prosody. One of his patients was recovering from an abscess in her brain; in a follow-up appointment, she seemed much better. The patient’s husband, who had accompanied her, asked to speak with Dr. Heilman privately, with his wife’s permission. “My wife and I no longer have a meaningful relationship,” he told Dr. Heilman. The husband’s business was failing, and he was depressed, but…he said that his wife didn’t even recognize that he was upset.

Back in the examining room, Dr. Heilman asked the patient to identify which emotion he was conveying, while he said the same sentence in a variety of ways: happily, sadly, angrily. The patient could not distinguish the various emotions; she had lost the ability to read emotional prosody.

Elizabeth: As opposed to some other kind of prosody? There is more than one kind?

Barbara: Yes, actually. We know that there are two kinds of prosody: emotional and linguistic. Emotional (affective) prosody conveys emotion and is mainly processed by the right hemisphere of the brain.

But there is also linguistic prosody, which changes the meaning of a word or sentence and is mainly processed by the left side of the brain which, for most people, is the hemisphere that is the seat of language—words and grammar. Common examples of linguistic prosody are: CONtent versus conTENT. Or…TWO white shirts versus two WHITE shirts.

I have to emphasize that this is a very simplified explanation and also that there is a lot of individual variation. But that is the gist of it.

Elizabeth: It’s striking how complex language is and how much we take it for granted, even writers.

Barbara: And yet, even without prosody, it’s amazing what we achieve with just words and grammar. We manage to express emotions, drive a scientific idea forward, share memories, make imaginary places come to life, create characters who never existed but who are known the world over, and more…

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