The Commingling of Orality and Literacy in Giving a Paper at a Scholarly Conference

Bibliographic Data

ID7438801
AuthorsDeborah Tannen (0000-0003-0132-5440, corresponding author)
Year1988
Volume63
Issue1
Pages34-34
Publication date1988-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/455421
OpenAlexW2312338072
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited11

N AUGUST 1984 I received an invitation to participate in a symposium on Questions of Orality and Literacy, organized as a tribute to Walter J. Ong, S.J., the scholar who has inspired so much work on this topic with nearly a score of books. (See, in particular, Ong 1967, 1977, 1979 [1958], 1982.) symposium was to be held 29-31 July 1985 at Rockhurst College in Kansas City. Knowing that I would not be able to be present at the symposium, I agreed to prepare a paper which would be read aloud by someone else. Wanting to write a paper which argues that orality and literacy are intertwined in discourse, I took advantage of the fairly unusual circumstances to dramatize rather than simply argue my point, with reference to the discourse genre GIVING A PAPER. Goffman (1981, 160) says (or writes) of his lecture (or paper) The Lecture, It was designed to be spoken, and through its text and delivery to provide an actual instance-not merely a discussion---of some differences between talk and the printed word. I am indebted to Goffman for providing, in his celebrated lecture/paper, both license and model for what I have tried to do in my current humble one. Moreover, his justifications for publishing a printed version very close to the text he wrote for oral presentation are relevant to mine as well, and I therefore excerpt them from his preface (160-61

Orality · Digital Communication and Language · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Media, Communication, and Education

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