Written Communication. Different Types of written texts.

Structures and
Formal Elements. Rules Governing Written Texts. Routines and Formulae.

1. Introduction

It has often been assumed that whatever is spoken can also be written, that

writing is simply an alternative form of expression to speech. That is to say, a

writing system is capable of representing all the possible wordings in the language

by providing ready-made (codified) expressions, for the majority of elements, and

by providing the means of creating (coding) expressions for elements that are not

already codified, for example new borrowings and coinings.

According to this it has been important the creation of some rules for governing

these written texts, to make them fully understandable and to create in the emitter

and the receiver a sharing background towards texts, no matter the information

contained on them, so communication is achieved with no longer efforts. We will

further study them but as a starting point we will say that they have been created

according to two tenets: conformity, as languages do change according to

different social environments where they are developed (emergencies of literary,

religious, pure standard languages and the like) their written form is presumed to

fulfil these resolutions and uniformity, providing codified expressions for all the

established wordings of the language whether in characters, in syllabic or

alphabetic spellings. Although it is important to state that there are various aspects

of spoken language that have no counterpart in writing: rhythm, intonation,

degrees of loudness, variation in voice quality, pausing, and phrasing- as well as

indexical features by which we recognize for example that it is Mary talking and not

Jane. The existence of this gap has led to some other methods of compensation

that we will see during the current topic. Firstly, let´s pay attention to the

characteristics of written communication in contrast with speech.

2. Written Communication. Characteristics

Written Communication in Contrast with Speech,

Speakers have a much greater range of possibilities at their command than

writers. Apart from the actual words they use, they can vary their intonation and

stress. By varying the pitch and intonation in their voice, they can clearly convey

their attitude to what they are saying.

The most important difference between writing and speaking concerns the need for

accuracy. Native speakers constantly make “mistakes” when they are speaking,

hesitating and saying the same in different manners. Except in formal situations,

this is considered normal and acceptable behaviour. A piece of writing, however,

with mistakes and half-finished sentences would be considered illiterate since it is

expected that writing should be correct.

The writer also suffers from the disadvantage of not getting immediate feedback

from the reader, and sometimes not getting feedback at all. Writers cannot use

intonation or stress and facial expression, gesture and body movement are either

denied to them. These disadvantages have to be compensated for by greater

quality and the use of grammatical and stylistic techniques. To sum up, writing

needs a more accurate logical organization.

Problems of spelling and handwriting can also be found. English spelling is

notoriously difficult for speakers of other languages especially if we take into

account the differences between its signs and its oral transformation, and

handwriting is particularly problematic for speakers of languages such as Arabic or

Chinese, which do not have the Roman script.

As we mentioned in the introduction some considerations need to be taken into

account, particularly when teaching writing such as the organizing of sentences into

paragraphs, how paragraphs are joined together, and the general organisation of

ideas into a coherent piece of discourse.

Another of the differences consists of the lexical density of the written message in

comparison to the spoken message. Let´s see it through an example,

Let´s consider the following sentence:

“The Trust has offered advice to local government authorities on cemetery

conservation”

It consists of twelve words. Of these, eight are lexical items (content words, main

carriers of meaning) and four are grammatical items (function words, whose more

important feature is to provide linking between words). Grammatical items are

those that function in closed systems in the language; in English determiners,

pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and the like. In other words, there are twice

as many lexical words as there are grammatical words. If we do a translation of the

above sentence into a form that would be more likely to occur in speech, it would

be something like:

“In order to a proper conservation of the cemetery the Trust has contacted the

local government for offering them some advice”

The number of lexical words remains invariable but the number of grammatical

words is dramatically increased from 4 to 13. And we have to regard the last

sentence analysed is not especially “colloquial”.

This is a characteristic difference between spoken and written language. Written

language displays a much higher ratio of lexical items to total running words. Thus

we can say that one of the most important differences between written and spoken

language is one of the density with which the information is presented. Relative to

each other, written language is dense and spoken language is sparse. We have

already made a distinction between Lexical items, often called “content words” and

Grammatical items. Technically, they are ITEMS rather than words in the usual

sense and they are LEXICAL because they function in lexical sets, not in

grammatical systems, they enter into open systems. That means that they belong

to a set of items that couldn’t be closed and, moreover, is extendable. We may

understand it better if we are acquainted with the definition of a closed system first.

A grammatical item, for example, the personal pronoun him enters into a closed

system when it contrasts on one dimension with he, his and on another dimension
with me, you, her, it, us, them, one; but that is all. There are no more items in

these classes and we cannot add any. With a lexical item, however, we cannot close

off its class membership. Then an open system will be contrasted in a different set

of dimensions that reach no end, and for example a word such as cemetery that we

find in the example above is in contrast with graveyard, also with park, stadium,

arena also with morgue; and we realize that there is no way of closing off the sets

of items and even more if we take into account that each item belonging to an open

system can create different connotations on the reader according to the particular

context that he / she shares with that item. For example, considering a school and

a building both close to a coffee factory, the smell of coffee won´t hold the same

connotation for the child whom the smell of coffee means go to school than for the

child whom the smell of coffee means going back home after school, so they will

have different reaction towards the item coffee. The lexical density of a treated

language can be measured by considered words as the simplest items of a system.

After considering these differences let´s go ahead with the different types of

written texts.

3. Different Types of Written Texts

The development of writing in contrast with the universal usage of language

is a difficult issue to be dated. However, it has been linked to the complex of events

whereby certain human groups changed over from a mobile way of life to

permanent settlement: from a predominantly hunting and gathering economy to a

predominantly agricultural one. This enabled language to satisfy a new range of

functional demands. Writing was used for invoicing goods being traded, for

collecting taxes, for recording tribute received and for keeping accurate

measurements of land.

But once it had come into existence, it also took over some functions that had

previously been fulfilled by spoken language. Sacred texts, lyric and epic poetry

began to be written down. And then writing took over the main burden of the

transmission of cultural knowledge: education came into being.

A possible list of types of texts under a functional point of view would be the

following one:

1. For Action: that would include public signs on roads and stations; product labels

and instructions; telephone directories; manual; ballot papers etc.

2. For social contact: such as personal correspondence: letters, postcards, e-mails.

3. Primarily for Information: Newspapers and current affairs magazines, non fiction

books, textbooks etc.

4. Primarily for entertainment: Comic strips; film subtitles; poetry; fiction books

etc.

These categories are not clear cut; what is for information now may be for action

later, what is instructional may also has entertainment value, and so on.

Texts can also be classified according to the contexts, in which texts do occur,

which can make them to hold such labels as “journal article” ; “science textbook”

etc. And according to a less institutionalized classification based on the purpose of

the text; then we can consider the following classes: narrative (to inform about

actions and events), descriptive (to give details about what things are like),

expressive (to demonstrate authors feeling through subjective views of reality),

argumentative (to defend an opinion) and prescriptive (to indicate the steps or

necessary action).

The following point that we are going to consider is the structure of a written text.

4. Structure and Formal Elements

To consider the structure of written text is very important to deal with the

formal characteristics of written English which, at the same time, differentiate it

from spoken English. Written English shows several characteristics as follows:

Nominalization and Generic Reference (She will buy the bread); Objectivity is

essential except for texts with the expressive function. Formality especially in

technical texts, these also shown a preference of the Passive Voice instead the

active case. Written texts do not admit hedges or discourse fillers. The use of verbs

also vary verbs of thinking (provide or convey instead of give) are widely used;
the expressions won´t be ambiguous and all the references will be explicit.

Contractions and false starts will not be used either. Although texts depend in large

measure to the writer purpose and even in some stylistic features, we can define

the above mentioned characteristics as quite common in written texts. Now let´s

pay attention to the norms which govern written texts.

5. Norms which govern written texts

Any text exhibits certain linguistic features which allow us to identify it as a

text. We identify a stretch of language as a text partly because it is presented to us

as a text, and partly because we perceive connections within and among its

sentences. These connections are of several kinds:

First, there are connections which are established through the arrangement of

information within each clause and the way this relates to the arrangement of

information in preceding and following clauses and sentences ;(given / new

information; subject / predicate ).

Second, there are surface connections (cohesive devices) which establish

interrelations between persons and events, that is, the social context, or the social

distance; these allow us to trace participants in a text and to interpret the way in

which different parts of the text relate to each other.

Finally, there are underlying semantic connections, coherence, which allow us to

“make sense” of a text as a unit of meaning. For example, in describing a

landscape, novelists are faced with a series of problems:

1. Level: at what level should they describe it? Should they merely say “I saw

a beautiful landscape”, or should they mention every last leaf or pebble?

2. Content: given the level, which parts should they include and which should

they omit? Normally, the landscape will be too complicated to include

everything, so they must pick and choose.

3. Order: Given the parts they have decided to include, what order should they

put them in? Should they describe them from left to right, from the nearest

to farthest, from most to least important, from largest to smallest, or how?

 4. Relations: for the given level, content, and order, how should they relate the

parts to each other? Is it enough for the parts to be listed as present, or

should each be given a precise location with respect to the rest?

The writer purpose as well as when concerned with the structure of texts has a lot

to do with the “solution to the problem”.

A linguist such as De Beaugrande defines a text as a communicative occurrence

which meets 10 standards, seven of them are constitutives:

1. Cohesion (grammatical or lexical relationships between the elements of a text)

2. Coherence (relationship which links the meanings)

3. Intentionality (the writer’s attitude to produce a cohesive and coherent text)

4. Acceptability (the receiver accepts the relevance of the message)

5. Informativity (extent to which the occurrences of the text are expected or not)

6. Situationality (factors that make a text relevant to a situation)

7. Intertextuality (factors that make the utilization of one text dependent upon

knowledge of one or more previously encountered texts)

And three of them are regulative:

1. Efficiency: the less expenditure of effort used for communication, the more

efficient a text is.

2. Effectiveness: the stronger the impression the more effective.

3. Appropriateness: the agreement between the setting and the ways in which the

7 standards are upheld.

Even though the emission of texts is quite personal to the extent that the writer will

use different features according to the purposes and the aims he wants to achieve

through them. There are some routines and formulae that allow us to be provided

with some patterns of organisation of texts according to their classification.

6. Routines and Formulae.

As noted above some routines and formulae can be established for the

creation of texts. It has to be considered that these formulae requires that the text

has been classified according to a category, because they are going to depict
special features depending on the type of text it is, so very institutionalized

categories are the ones which has been considered for this account. It is very

difficult to fix a pattern for each type of text because they are relatively personal

relying very much on the writer purpose or knowledge and bias towards use them.

But at the same time their existence can be very useful for English language

learners especially regarding communicative purposes. Let´s consider some of

these set phrases depending on the type of text:

1. Letters:

1.1. Informal letters:

Openings: Dear (Proper name)

Closings: Best Wishes

Yours
Love from

1.2. Less formal letters:

Openings: Dear Mr. / Mrs. / Miss / Ms. (surname)

Closings: Yours sincerely

With Best Wishes

1.3. More formal letters:

Openings: Dear Sir / Madam,

Closings: Yours faithfully

2. An opinion essay:

2.1. To introduce an opinion:

In my view…
In my opinion…
From my point of view…

2.2. To add information:

In addition to this…
Furthermore,…

2.3. To end the essay:

To sum up,…
In short
In conclusion

A very important aspect of academic prose is presenting and supporting arguments.

The higher frequency of linking adverbials in academic prose not only reflects this

communicative need but also the characteristic choice of this register to mark links

between ideas overtly. In some texts, especially as arguments are concluded, each

of a series of sentences will begin with a linking adverbial, such as: To summarize,

Thus, As a result and the like.

3. In order to list a series of points a writer may take use of: First(ly),

Second(ly), next etc.

4. To explain a point already made and introduce examples: that is,

namely, eg. etc.

7. Conclusion

Since texts are a primarily source for teaching English as a foreign language,

we as teachers have a direct relationship with them. Being aware that the four

basic skills can be developed through them, they constitute a fundamental piece for

education. In addition to provide students with a means to get acquainted with

some notions of the foreign language. They can also convey some authentic

materials that will enhance the interest of students towards the subject. Besides,

the correct realization of texts considered as the representation of speech towards

sign constitutes one of the main basic skills as it is writing. If students are provided

with some notions about texts such as their structure, patterns of use according to

types of texts as well as the realisation of these mentioned types, it will be a useful

tool to let students to improve their usage of English. In order to exert such an

influence on students the teacher should be properly trained on different

classification of texts and their usage. To sum up, since we consider communication

competence as the main goal achieved through the acquisition of a second

language the proper creation of texts of different types as well as accuracy when

writing will be crucial points to be considered by CSE English teachers.