But in a way, with digital text, the corrections becomes even less visible,
so there might be suggested texts where you spell something some way and
the suggested text tells you how to spell it the correct way or a different way.
But also what we do with a keyboard is a lot of repetitive stuff.
Where we're all the time looking back over at what we've done, going back over it,
this kind of a cycle of moving a bit forward, looking back a sentence,
moving a bit forward, looking back a sentence.
And we actually do a lot of correction, particularly in these digital spaces
which, for the purpose of making our corrections invisible, not to be seen.
So the correction strategies are very, very different.
The actual processes of fabrication are very, very different.
But the next thing about this contrast between speaking and
writing is speaking is relentlessly linear.
Remember, it happens in time.
I can't go back and correct something I said three or four sentences ago.
The only way I can deal with that is to restate it, or reframe it, or
make a correction or something now.
It's linear because it's absolutely wedded to time, something that was said five
seconds ago is gone forever because those seconds can't be recreated, and
I have to repeat those seconds in the future if I want to recreate them.
Whereas the process of writing is multilinear so, in other words,
I'm looking back at the text up there, I'm looking at the structure there,
I'm thinking where I might go here.
So my thinking processes around the text are not
just the linearity of time, but they are the multilinearity of
space because I'm framing this thing on a screen or on a page, and so on.
And one final thing about the differences between speaking and writing.
In our theory of multimodality, which we've been
outlining through these videos, this course, this book,
that one of the interesting things is what each mode is aligned to.
And speaking is very much alive with gesture.
Here I am doing all this kind of stuff.
If you like, I'm the conductor of my own speech,
it's like an orchestra where I'm doing this as I speak.
And goodness knows, I tell you what, I don't know what this and this and
this means.
I'm doing all these things, and they do mean something,
and I'm barely conscious of it.
So, in other words, speaking and gesture are really closely aligned.
Whereas, in a way, writing is very closely aligned with image.
The words are images, themselves, but
we also often put images in text in a multimodal world.
So I can't put images in my speaking.
Well, in fact, I can because it's called video.
But, in fact, when I'm speaking in normal speech, I can't put images in there.
And, likewise, when I'm building a written text, gesture has gone, right?
I've got images in there, I'm communicating,
unless it's a video, gesture's gone.
So what's interesting is that the kinds of other modes that speaking and
writing are naturally aligned with are quite different.
As I say, to repeat, speaking is aligned with gesture,
writing is aligned with image.
Gesture happens in time, image happens in space.
So these are actually remarkably important differences.
So here we are in literacy in schools and we think, it's about phonics,
it's about the transliteration of speech.
And if we can conquer phonics,
we're on the way to literacy because you're just writing down speech.
It's actually a lot more than that,
it's actually profoundly different in ways which are not always that obvious.
And what it involves, it involves a different kind of mental effort.
My thinking processes in speaking are actually very, very different from my
thinking and design process, if you like, in the process of writing.