Abstract
Although speech and writing constitute different modes of communication and make different demands on a communicator, there is some reason to think that the act of speaking may directly assist the act of writing. Tovatt and Miller (1967) have reported results of an experimental composition program in which each student was taught to test the patterns he writes against his ingrained oral pattern (p. 7) . Citing Alexander Pope's line The must seem an echo to the sense, Tovatt and Miller claimed that reading a passage aloud can help writers examine their work for inept phrasing or lack of clarity. Robert Zoellner (1969) and Terry Radcliffe (1972) have argued that students are often able to say aloud that which they are not able to write. Both writers suggest that speaking aloud to another student can help students discover and clarify ideas they will subsequently write about. We accept those scholars' basic claim: spoken language may help writers formulate or clarify the message they wish to communicate in writing. But we wonder if speech and writing may be related in still another way. Both of us occasionally find ourselves thinking of our writing as recorded speech, wondering how a passage will to a reader, what voice qualities volume, timbre, speed, inflection are suggested by our written language. Both of us can think of times when we were very concerned with how a written piece (one intended for a journal, not for oral presentation to a group) would be performed, how it would if delivered to a live audience. We were concerned not with sound as echo to the sense but whether the implied in writing was appropriate for the speaker-audience relationship we were trying to establish. Given our assumption that spoken language and written