Posted: May 25, 2020 11:26 pm
felltoearth wrote:Further to above, on a fundamental level, we have the ability to write down words and distribute thoughts. This give us the benefit of being able to construct logical arguments, think about them, and improve, correct and rearrange them. This also allows for multiple subjects to review and advise. This is something we have that other social animals don’t possess.
This is well expressed. One of the things I try to convey to my students about how to analyze language is the difference between the spoken form and the written form. Both forms have an edit function.
In spoken language, speakers rarely proceed through more than a turn or two without some kind of repair taking place, with self-initiated self-repair being the default*. Similarly, writers constantly review, reword, revise and edit their writing. The difference between the spoken form and the written form is that in the spoken form, the repairable item and the repair process are accessible to others. They are on-record and can be referred to by recipients.
In the written form of language the repair and editing processes are invisible to the final reader. The final product is presented as essentially perfect and error free. Also in the written form, not only did the original writer have extensive opportunity to work on the product as he or she was writing, with way more leeway to take time to edit the work hours, days or weeks after the initial writing, editors and reviewers will have had a lot of say in the form of the final product, way more than listeners can influence the spoken output of the speaker.
This is especially true in academic writing where peer reviewers and editors work in a very detailed fashion to prompt changes to the expression, phrasing and discourse continuity of the writing in addition to the actual factual content. No academic paper can ever be conceived of as 100% the work of a single writer. (In addition, many papers are jointly authored, with further opportunities for review and re-working of the text.) The final version of a paper has been worked on minutely by several people over dozens and dozens of versions.
The upshot of all of this is the removal of superfluous, emotional or subjective language from the final piece, and this is what often makes a lot of academic writing so dry and difficult to read. This is also what makes good academic writing reliable.
*Here is the canonical paper on repair processes in spoken interaction:
Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53(2), 361-382.
PDF available at
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=on+the+preference+for+self+repair+&btnG=