So I guess this isn’t exactly a profound thought, but I am extremely interested in the distance between spoken language and written language – in terms of first year composition at least. Emig seems to comment that, since writing is a learned behavior and speaking is not (arguably), there are more opportunities for knowledge in the writing process.
I think on a more fundamental level our students find this separation of language challenging because they aren’t fully aware it exists. As young writers who haven’t really gained experience in writing yet, it becomes difficult for them to separate their thinking voice, speaking voice, and writing voice. I’d argue, based on stacks of Freshman essays, that these are all the same voice in most Freshman students’ view.
This is a huge area of frustration for us as teachers because we [unknowingly] have separated these voices and given them functions of their own. While all of these voices inevitably collide and work with each other to create language, I think an understanding of how they are different is ultimately the purpose of teaching “audience” in early composition courses. When a writer has an audience, we hope that they think about how they will address that audience – the same way a student would speak differently when giving a presentation as opposed to having a conversation with his/her friend over a beer.