Am I the only humanoid who prefers the written word to the spoken? It takes away the lack of forethought most people give talking. A cool guy named James gave advice in a book suggesting to be slow to speak and quick to listen, insinuating that humanity has a natural tendency to do the opposite. Writing something down puts your thoughts before you; you can criticize yourself much better from this standpoint; your words have longevity and can be read by a vast multitude of people; you can form a far more structured idea and create convincing arguments, beautiful descriptions and fascinating explanations. This is why writing exists.
Given you can do most of the same things with spoken words, it's really the words themselves that give depth to communication. People too often, I feel, emphasize the importance of body language. The same things that are said in speech can be transcribed to a page. Certainly there is voice inflection and more precision in oral language, but a block of text is easier to get seen than a speech to get heard; only in this recent age of dying print are videos of speeches made possible and even then there's many articles, journals, magazines and conversations on social networks that are created primarily in text.
Even now you're reading text. This is far more thought out than if you and I were to have a conversation on the matter because I can edit this to death. As Ernest Hemingway once said, 'the first draft of anything is ****.' Only when we stop to analyze do we realize our flaws and virtues. Now we come to the concept of emotions and words. Jonah Lehrer spoke on the matter saying emotions are like an elephant: hard to control; we must think about thinking in order to assess our emotional thoughts. Spoken words, when not prepared, are often riddled with pathos rather than logos and on the fly, people can make awful mistakes. Writing is cold, calculated, efficient like an automaton. Then comes the critique that you lose tone in written words.
False. Words, written or not, move people to tears, to jingoism or even to eat at Taco Bell. In an English 101 class I took, I learned about the importance of considering the reader, the audience, when constructing every paper. The better one can craft a paper to every individual, (an astronaut explaining astronautics to physics majors, a student writing to academia, a child persuading an alien that earth has good real estate) the better the communication. Socrates himself has an interesting critique of writing things down, which Plato proceeded to write down. Socrates offered the insight that unlike speech, text separates the author from the reader. By lack of presence, the same explanation would be offered to two very different individuals. (Say explaining complicated mathematics to an enthusiastic middle-aged man working as an engineer and a student in high school taking some government-forced classes.) In this way writing is a poor way to communicate, but then again so is speech. To put something to the masses is to sacrifice clarity and conciseness, stripping away the personalness of a letter or a conversation to the far-reachingness of a book or an oration. One cannot simply tailor every conversation or paragraph to make perfect sense to everyone.
In conclusion, text is cool.
