ABSTRACT
For a variety of cultural and disciplinary reasons, talk and text, the oral and the written, have typically been represented as very different and very separate phenomena. However, as chapter 7 suggested, studies of writing (and reading) processes-in schools, workplaces, and the community-quickly found that writing is often initiated and planned in talk, that readers often talk through texts they are reading with others (sometimes reading all or part of a text aloud), that readers’ responses to writers’ in-progress texts often involve talk, and that many texts (such as scripts for plays and movies, speeches, advertisements, and religious rituals) are written to be spoken. A political speech, for example, may be talked through in a series of meetings, written and rewritten, orally performed and critiqued, rewritten again, and finally memorized or read aloud with a teleprompter. A note to a friend that two students write during lunch at school may be interactively composed in talk as it is written (“tell her about the fight,” “say that she was really kickin’ it at the dance”). In terms of content, not only do people often talk about texts, but texts often represent people talking: Either the note or the political speech may report on other people’s conversations (so and so said . . .). In short, through processes of production and reception, talk and writing are often jumbled together. In this chapter, we explore the important and complex relationships that link talk and text, mapping some of the ways that talk is transformed into, shapes, and occasions texts as well as some of the ways that text is transformed into, shapes, and occasions talk.
