Welcome to Video two, where we explore the three vocabularies that each of us has. These are your reading vocabulary, made up of words you know, when you see them in print. Your writing vocabulary is smaller than your reading vocabulary for you wouldn't use many of the words you recognize in print. When you write a letter or report, then there's your speaking vocabulary. This is the smallest of the three because it's limited by the listeners word knowledge, and by your ability to speak the word so that they hear it. Thus many of the words you know when you see them in print, or use them when you write, or have little use to you and speaking, speak only speaking words.

I'm reminded of an old Toastmaster friend of mine named Wally while he was a retired newspaper journalist who dedicated his working life to creating stories in print come alive when it campaigns delivering oral presentations. He had some difficulty, he had written his speeches to be read. When he went to deliver them orally, he found that his sentences were too long and wordy. When we read a paragraph in a book, we have the punctuation mark serving as road signs, if you will, we can see when we need to stop. We can tell if a sentence is a question or not based on there being a question mark at the end of the sentence. We can also reread a sentence or paragraph if we don't grasp the meaning the first time.

Not so with content delivered orally. We only have one chance and listening what a speaker has to say to us. We can't go back and re listen to what they said. They've already gone on to delivering new content as a speaker. That means that we have to craft our messages clearly, so that our audience member understands them the first time The next slide we're going to take a look at comparing and contrasting, oral and written communication. There are many differences between communicating and writing, and communicating and speech, one to one or one to many.

Let's look at some differences between the two. Because talking is face to face and personal, it is more direct than writing. Hand and body gestures, facial expressions, and vocal variety helped greatly to support face to face communication. It is also reinforced by instant feedback from listeners in the form of smiles, frowns, applause, catcalls, clenched fists, and so on. An alert speaker who is sensitive to feedback and shift gears and adapt to changing circumstances. Writing however, depends solely on words and punctuation to deliver the message.

There are no gestures to no voice. And if there's any feedback it takes time to reach the writer. Good talking is wordy, repetitive and far less structured than efficient writing. Perhaps that's why so many more people find talking well, easier than writing well. A good speech reproduced word for word on paper usually does not read well, because it rambles and repeats words and thoughts. It's not nearly as disciplined and organized as good writing.

Effective talking is aimed at people's minds and hearts through their ears, and ears prefer short, direct, conversational sentences. Long in both senses are acceptable and rating for two reasons. One, the eye can absorb many more words in an instant than a speaker can say. If a reader stumbles on a marathon sentence, they can reread it at leisure. Not so with the spoken words. Once uttered, they're gone, especially in the speech.

If the listener misses a sentence, will she in the speaker have lost part of the message? There's no going back, except perhaps during the question and answer period. In a conversation of course, the listener can ask the speaker to repeat the next video, we look at the language of speaking