Speech vs. Writing
At its heart, writing is simply a form of communication that has many similarities to speech. But there are also some different rules to follow. Read this brief section on speech vs. writing.
Ok, so there is good and slightly less good news here. The good news is that many of you have probably been expressing yourself by speaking the English language much or all of your lives. Even for those who are not native speakers, I would guess that some of the first English you learned was spoken. This means that most of you probably are already pretty good at taking the great stuff in your head and putting it into words that you speak.
Particularly for native speakers, the act of taking your thoughts and putting them into spoken words that can express those thoughts to another person or group of people is probably something you don't even think about.
The good news here is that there are absolutely similarities between the way you speak and the way you write. In particular when we talk about grammatical concepts and revision, we will talk about reading your work aloud. There are some major differences between speech and writing, but generally speaking, if something you have written sounds wrong when you read it aloud (that is, it isn't something you would say), there is a good chance that it is wrong.
The less good news (and note that I'm not calling it "bad news"!) is that, for a number of reasons, writing follows some very different rules from speech.
This is where non-native speakers have a small advantage. Because you have not spoken and written this language your whole life, you don't have as many or as deeply ingrained habits. For some of my native speakers, there will be things you currently do out of habit in your non-college "language communities" (see the next reading section) that will have to be changed for the new environment of college writing.
Source: Erin Severs
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