Oral communication can exploit intonation and voice pitch to convey information.

The second passage is from a face-to-face interview of former president Harry Truman by biographer Merle Miller Plain Speaking [New York: Berkley Books, 1974], p. 242. An Interview with Harry Truman Line Sentence Q. What do you consider the biggest mistake you made as President? 1 1 A. That damn fool from Texas that I first made Attorney General 2 2 and then put on the Supreme Court. 3 I don’t know what got into me. 4 3 He was no damn good as Attorney General, and on the Supreme 5 4 Court . . . it doesn’t seem possible, but he’s been even worse. 6 He hasn’t made one right decision that I can think of. 7 5 And so when you ask me what was my biggest mistake, that’s it. 8 6a Putting Tom Clark on the Supreme Court of the United States. 9 6b I thought maybe when he got on the Court he’d improve, 10 7 but of course, that isn’t what happened. 11 I told you when we were discussing that other fellow. 12 8a After a certain age it’s hopeless to think people are going to 13 8b change much. 14 It’s apparent at a glance how strikingly different these passages are. The trust deed is 138 words long and comprises only two sentences. By contrast, the 135 words of the Truman interview occur in eight sentences. The average sentence length is 69 words for the trust deed, 17 for the interview. In transcribing Truman’s words, the interviewer made nine sentences; in numbering them here, we have used the letters a and b to indi- cate a combining of two interviewer’s sentences into single sentences so as not to exag- gerate the number of separate sentences. You will find it instructive to examine the passages carefully to identify other linguis- tic features that contribute to making the registers different. Try It Yourself: Before you read the analysis that follows, jot down as many observations about differences in vocabulary and grammar as you can note in the trust deed and the Truman interview. Lexicon and Grammar One easily observed difference between the passages is in vocabulary. The deed of trust contains certain words and phrases that might seem odd if they appeared in the inter- view. Likewise, Truman’s language contains certain earthy words that might strike you as inappropriate in a legal document. You will also see that in the collocation of words with other words, as well as in pre- ferred lexical categories and in syntax, there are striking differences between the pas- sages. Such features—not in isolation, but taken together—help mark passages as being