Even a moment's reflection will show that the spoken American language is backed by expressive features lacking in the written lan...guage: the rise or fall of the voice at the ends of phrases and sentences; the application of vocal loudness to this or that word or part of a word; the use of gesture; the meaningful rasp or liquidity, shouting or muting, drawling or clipping, whining or breaking, melody or whispering imparted to the quality of the voice. Written English, lacking clear indication of such features, must be so managed that it compensates for what it lacks. It must be more carefully organized than speech in order to overcome its communicative deficiencies as compared with speech. In speech. we safeguard meaning by the use of intonation, stress, gesture, and voice qualities. In writing, we must deal with our medium in such a way that the meaning cannot possibly be misunderstood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the lang...uage he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader's eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... no book ... ever competed with the Bible. The story of Ruth was better than Ramona, and the poetry of Job was better than Long...fellow. I still have my first big Bible, carefully underlined through with red and black ink, and interleafed [sic] with painfully written manuscript pages.... Margery and I earned our five cents a week for church and a penny for Sunday school by learning three verses of the Bible a day and six on Sunday. We learned dozens and dozens of chapters. I supposed "Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" were better poetry, but I didn't like them so well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man's life may be best written... by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it... to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of... a finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless ...we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unl...ike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professio...nal readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people like you would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear the professionals decode and read the books aloud for you. This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors and I- Married-a-Midget writers who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the universe-- which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be u...nderstood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »