Page 138 - Literacy in the New Media Age

MEANING AND FRAMES 127

Here I will show some points on this sequence from speech-like writing to
fully writing-like writing. First a short spoken extract (from an interview on a
public access radio-station); the speaker was a woman trade-unionist.

See […] we went through this in ’81 […] and I was one of the officials
[…] that were involved […] er once we’d worked out the severance side of
things […] we were gonna have to deal with the people […] who wanted
[…] to relocate […] and […] they said to management […] we had
hardship […] management rejected it […] then […]
Relatively informal speech (an example of type 1)

This first example has eleven clauses, here separated by ‘[…]’. Only three of
these are embedded clauses (‘one of the officials that were involved’, ‘deal with
the people who wanted’, ‘the people who wanted to relocate’). The others are
conjoined through a variety of means, for instance intonationally. This is not
indicated here, though the dots between ‘See’ and ‘we went’ indicate not only a
pause but also an intonational linkage, in that the voice has not been lowered
fully; this means that the hearer expects a continuation of the same textual
segment. The majority of adjoining is done through the use of conjunctions
‘and’, ‘then’ and so on. In this text, clauses follow one another, like beads on a
chain, one might say, with two or three clauses occasionally twined together.
The second example is the opening and the second sentence of a mock school-
leaving examination answer.

The main pattern of the Australian tax system is a heavy reliance on
income tax, it has a tendency to cause inflation. It also has relied on partly
the Keynsian policies, the equity of the system has left something to be
desired causing uneven income distribution and other problems.
Relatively speech-like sentence-structure (an example of type 1; moving
towards sentence-structure)

Here the link between the two clauses in the first sentence is made in a speech-
like manner, that is, two clauses are simply adjoined ‘… a heavy reliance on
income tax, it has a …’. With such adjoining, the assumption made by the reader
will be that the link is to be made intonationally, that is, as in speech. When this
sentence is read as though it were spoken, the voice does not go to a low point at
the juncture of the two clauses, but tends to be held at mid-level. The effect is
that it is heard as speech, and as speech it sounds fine. When it is read as a
written sentence, with the voice – the ‘silent voice’ of reading writing – lowering
at the juncture, there is an uncomfortable lack of closure at ‘income tax’. Given
the comma-punctuation, the expected relation, with the following clause, is that
it should be a relative clause: ‘income tax, which has a tendency’. The pronoun
‘it’ can be used as an anaphoric pronoun (a pronoun which refers to specific
segments of preceding speech or writing) in writing, if the punctuation indicates