Syntactic Differences between Speech and Writing

ORE THAN FIFTY YEARS AGO, Woolbert (1922, p. 269) called attention to a linguistic problem: Speaking and writing are alike-and different. Just how like and how different has never been adequately stated. Less than a decade ago, Gleason (1965, p. 368) observed that the problem still had not been solved: We know that written and spoken structures differ to some extent, and that there are differences in the underlying grammatical structure, but we have no accurate idea of their magnitude.