From the point of view of our design process for speaking and writing,
we regard writing as a specific kind of mental effort.
It's a different way of thinking about meaning making from speaking.
In speaking, we tend to do it together.
Generally in the same time.
It is linear.
It is repetitive and redundant.
We make errors and we correct them as we go along.
It generally comes in clusters of clauses, and
quite often has gesture also associated with it.
>> How do we describe writing?
What I'm going to do is go through three types of grammars,
which are traditional and well known.
And then a fourth grammar, which is our own reconstruction of a multimodal
grammar, a new grammar that we call a grammar of multiliteracies.
But let me talk about four famous, well known systems of grammar at first.
The first grammar I'm going to talk about is traditional grammar.
And that's what most conventionally we've learned in schools.
At school, I did Latin because in those days it was a good idea to do Latin.
And the way to describe the structure of Latin was around these
ideas of traditional grammar, and in fact I think I learned more traditional grammar
by learning Latin at school than I did learning it in English.
But in both places, traditional grammar was taught.
Now I'm going to describe what's in traditional grammar, and
then I'm going to say how traditional grammar is kind of impossible as well.
So let me just start with the conventional description of the elements of
traditional grammar.
So in traditional grammar,
at the most basic level we have tiny units of meaning called a morpheme.
So let's say the word impossible, right?
I've got possible, which is a stem, and im, which is a prefix.
So these two ideas of im meaning not, possible meaning possibility.
These two things come together and
each of those units is a morpheme, it's a unit of meaning.
We can also have suffix.
Like jump is a stem, jumped, ed on the end,
adds something, an element of meaning to the stem.
And the element of meaning is that it turns it into the past tense.
So in other words, we have these distinct elements which are parts of words.
In other words, the basic meaning units in a language
like English are not words, they're actually morphemes, okay?
What we can also do is we can then modify words by number,
we put an s on the end of cats, right?
So we can number verbs by tense.
The past tense, future tense.
In fact, there's all kinds of tenses in English.
English has present, present continuous, perfect, past, pluperfect,
there are all these crazy technical words,
a lot of which have now been forgotten to describe different types of tense.
For example, perfect tense is, I have walked.
