Page 136 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MEANING AND FRAMES 125

‘forensic’ tasks – whether the forensics of the court, or that of academic
research. There are few instances of the truly unpractised writer – young learners
excepted – whose writing is in fact transliteration. Transduction is, equally, rare:
there are few occasions when ordinary writers are called on to turn their (or
others’) speech – however it has been recorded – into writing. Again, academics
sometimes attempt it, and of course novelists constantly pretend to do it. In fact,
the mode of writing has developed a range of devices for this – direct reported
speech, indirect reported speech and various syntactic means for the more or less
full integration of speech into the mode of writing. (The histories of reading,
from reading aloud to silent reading, to suppressed reading aloud, as in sub-
vocalisation in reading, are relevant here.)
I take it for granted that speech and writing are modally distinct. However, the
relation between speech and writing is constantly present, is constantly active,
and can constantly be activated in particular ways in relation to specific purposes.
The new environments for writing, in which multimodality and the new
dominance of the screen on the one hand and changes in social power on the
other are pressing in on the organisation of writing as a mode, have as one
consequence that the interrelations of speech and writing are newly put into flux.
We need to understand what the principles of that relation are in order to focus
on those which remain as constants. This will allow us to understand in what
ways the principles are used now.
One significant dimension of punctuation is as the marker of the relations of
speech and writing, whether as a translation, transformation or transduction from
the one to the other. For those writers – I include myself among them – who have
it as a social aim to write in a more speech-like manner, punctuation has a
crucial place in translating from one system of framing, that of speech (through
pacing, intonation, accent), to another system of framing, that of writing (through
word-order, embedding, punctuation); this applies equally to those writers who
write with the cadences of speech in mind while they are writing.
The shift from speech to writing involves a shift in ‘logic’: a shift from the logic
of sequence in time to the logic of arrangements in (conceptual, visual and other)
space. This necessarily involves a change in the resources of framing. I can also
express this as a move from frames that rely predominantly on the use of the
voice – as stress or rhythm, and as pitch or intonation – to frames that use the
affordances of sequence – syntax. It is a move from clearly discrete linked
clause-elements to (clauses in) highly integrated sentence structures. It is a move
from the overt lexical (and, so, then, therefore), vocal and clausal framing of
speech to the reduction of types of frame and the production of larger units
which are syntactically and textually framed. The journey from speech to writing
is marked by a number of closely related aspects:

1 from a linear, sequential order of simple clause following on simple clause
in a chain-like structure, to a gradual ‘fusion’ of several clauses into one
syntactic unit;