Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 1
On private and public language, inner speech and teaching writing
Reflections on Thought and Language, by Lev S. Vygotsky.
Vygotsky is best known now as the originator of the concept of the zone of
proximal development. The following, however, is about how language
works in the mind and perhaps most significantly, about what Vygotsky
calls “inner speech.” To me, “inner speech” sounds a whole lot like a
crucial piece of the process of writing. The quotations come from a
translation of Thought and Language (1934) revised and edited by Alex
Kozulin, published by MIT Press, 1986.
*
Thinking about private and public language can start, logically enough, at
the single word. Vygotsky asserts, “Each word is . . . already a
generalization.” (6)
Why must it be so? Here’s why:
Edward Sapir: “The world of our experience must be enormously simplified
and generalized before it is possible to make a symbolic inventory of all
our experiences of things and relations, and this inventory is imperative
before we can convey ideas. The elements of language, the symbols that
ticket off experience, must therefore be associated with whole groups,
delimited classes, of experience rather than with the single experiences
themselves. Only so is communication possible, for the single experience
lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking,
incommunicable.” (Language, 1971, p. 12, qtd in Vygotsky p. 8) Does this
remind anyone of Moffett’s “what happens”? It should. But it’s a different
idea, because Sapir and Vygotsky point out that even a single word must
be, in order to communicate, about a class of experiences.
Okay, that’s true when we’re talking about public, communicative
use of language. But what about the individual consciousness, the single
experience, the private use of language? Something different is going on
there. Vygotsky points out that there are different private and public
versions of a word. He makes a crucial distinction between sense, which is
private, and meaning, which is public:
“The sense of a word, according to [Frederic Paulhan], is the sum of all the
psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a
dynamic, fluid, compex whole, which has several zones of unequal
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 2
stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, the most stable and
precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it
appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains
stable throughout the changes of sense. The dictionary meaning of a word
is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no more than a potentiality
that finds diversified realization in speech.” (244-245)
The sense of a word is personal (each word arouses different
psychological events in different people) and it is context-driven. Sense is
not stable, shared, public – those attributes belong to meaning. Sense
covers much more territory than meaning; in fact, it has no definite
boundaries because it is always being influenced by context and the
individual’s state of mind. Meaning has to remain narrower and more fixed
than sense in order to serve as a relatively reliable means of
communication.
Sense is a crucial aspect of artful writing. Because sense depends
on context, in the context of a piece of art writing there can be a sitespecific “influx of sense” (246) into a recurring word, name, or phrase. As
it keeps occurring, it acquires more and more sense particular to the art
work within which it lives. Just think of what the name “Bartleby” has
come to mean by the time you reach the end of “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
The literary term “connotation” is an acknowledgement of the
existence of sense as Vygotsky means it. Interestingly, when we talk with
students about connotation of some word in a given context, we are trying
to train them, as literary readers, to share a sense of the word as well as
its meaning. So we are trying to make the private thing more public, more
shared in common. Or another way to put it is, we’re trying to intervene in
their private, subjective experience.
Words in their private version, emanating a personal sense for the
individual, are the stuff of inner speech. Inner speech, in the words of
Kozulin’s intro, is “the internalization of an originally communicative
function, which becomes individualized inner mental function. . . . [Inner
speech is a] submergence of communication-for-others into individualized
reasoning-for-oneself: in inner speech, culturally prescribed forms of
language and reasoning find their individualized realization. . . . While
meaning [the public version of the word] stands for socialized discourse,
sense [the private version] represents an interface between one’s individual
(and thus incommunicable) thinking and verbal thought comprehensible
to others. Inner speech is not an internal aspect of talking; it is a function
in itself” (xxxvi-xxxvii).
So what, for the teaching of writing? Don’t worry, I’m getting there.
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 3
Here’s Vygotsky himself on inner speech: “inner speech is an
autonomous speech function. We can confidently regard it as a distinct
plane of verbal thought. It is evident that the transition from inner speech
to external speech is not a simple translation from one language into
another. It cannot be achieved by merely vocalizing silent speech.” (248)
Why? Partly because the sense of a word is a privately held
experience, and partly because inner speech has a characteristic
grammar: it omits the subject. The grammar of inner speech is condensed,
abbreviated, and “inner speech is almost entirely predicative because the
situation, the subject of thought, is always known to the thinker.” (182)
“Predication is the natural form of inner speech; psychologically, it
consists of predicates only. It is as much a law of inner speech to omit
subjects as it is a law of written speech to contain both subjects and
predicates.” (243) You can see this, by the way, in Ulysses, where Bloom’s
stream of consciousness, his inner speech, often consists of sentences
without subjects – one reason why it can be hard for the reader to follow.
Therefore the transition from inner speech to external speech “is a
complex, dynamic process involving the transformation of the predicative
idiomatic structure of inner speech into syntactically articulated speech
intelligible to others.” (248-9)
Now we’ll start to get the payoff in terms of teaching writing. It
seems to me we can say that the act of writing is the transformation of
inner speech into “syntactically articulated speech intelligible to others.”
So, if Vygotsky’s insights are worth something, they should be of some
help in understanding what’s going on as people write.
Consider this in relation to free writing. The form we call “free
writing” has unusual ground rules compared to other forms of writing.
When I assign free writing I say things like “just follow your thoughts with
your pen, go where they take you, it doesn’t have to have any particular
form, you don’t have to finish a thought, don’t worry about correctness.
The whole point is just to do it. It’s not a finished product, it just is what it
is.” Thinking about it in Vygotsky’s terms, free writing seems to allow for
both inner speech and external speech as part of what’s written on the
page. Thus free writing is deliberately, explicitly positioned on the
borderline between inner and outer. If I ask students to free write, they
may know that at least one other person (me) will read what they produce,
but intelligibility is not demanded (though it occurs far more often than
one might predict). The student remains free to write using the
idiosyncratic, personal, contextual sense of words rather than their stable
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 4
and shared meaning. (In fact, most people do much more of the latter than
the former.)
It seems to me this gets at why free writing works. If inner speech is
the substrate of any writing, and if free writing legitimizes and validates
inner speech, then it’s helping the writer have access to the crucial mental
resource. It would seem to me that talking explicitly about the inner
speech component of free writing might make it even more effective. I
think that’s worth a try.
Vygotsky articulates the “unknown general audience” situation in
writing by differentiating it from actual conversation. In dialogue with
another person face to face, “The changing motives of the interlocutors
determine at every moment the turn oral speech will take. It does not have
to be consciously directed – the dynamic situation takes care of that. . . .
In written speech, we are obliged to create the situation, to represent it to
ourselves. . . . Written speech . . . must explain the situation fully in order
to be intelligible. [The change from maximally compact inner speech to]
maximally detailed written speech requires what might be called deliberate
semantics – deliberate structuring of the web of meaning.” (181-182)
For those who happen to remember my piece called “Writing as a
Second Language,” what Vygotsky’s saying here provides helpful
elaboration of similar ideas.
Here is another insight that I believe gets us closer to understanding
what’s happening in the mind as one writes.
“The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual
movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to
thought.” (218)
“The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought;
that is why words cannot be put on by thought like a ready-made
garment. Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It
does not merely find expression in speech; it finds its reality and form.”
(219, my emphasis)
This is crucial: thought doesn’t “already exist” in some fixed,
completed but unverbalized form in the mind; it only hardens into some
definite form of existence as it is being put into words. And other forms
still remain possible. We can’t accurately say that the thought “is” the
words it’s put into; the thought is something other than those words, but
we can’t say what the something other is, because it isn’t in words. And
even when it starts to become words, it is at first words giving off a
powerful vibration of private sense rather than words as public meanings.
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 5
The words as meanings will always be compromises, always narrower than
the sense.
It’s like what Annie Dillard says about writing memoir: a written
verbal construct battens on your memories and replaces them. Having
written, you might (if you’re lucky) look at the words and say “Yes, that
was my experience.” But, of course, it wasn’t. Similarly, when you tell a
dream, what’s left, what you continue to have, is the telling; the dream
itself is lost. (Though when you write fiction, I believe you create a dream
you can dream again.)
So here is what I think might be the key idea, in a sentence:
“while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner
speech words die as they bring forth thought.” (249)
In external speech, thought is covered over, replaced, always to
some extent misrepresented, as words are strung syntactically together;
yet this is the only way it can come into being socially, for others. In inner
speech, conversely, the external, stable, shared meaning of the word dies
as it resonates within the mind into an interior sense. The word is allowed
to float away, having set up reverberations of thought.
Think about how this operates as you write (writing being the
“continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word
to thought”). Before you begin to write, before you put a word on the page,
you are engaged in inner speech, a rehearsal of sorts, but a very peculiar
one in which words float up in a completely dispensable, provisional way
and bring forth thought, which causes more words to float up . . . for an
indefinite time until some words start to be written down. While you
choose those written-down words, construct sentences, make socially
intelligible meanings, still at the same time the words are resonating
within you and creating an interior sense that the words you have so far
written have not yet expressed. What you’re hoping, of course, is that they
will resonate similarly within the reader; but you can never know if they
will for each new reader until they are read.
“Precisely because thought does not have its automatic counterpart
in words, the transition from thought to word leads through meaning. In
our speech, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext.” (251) Each
person’s understanding of word meanings, including what Vygotsky calls
sense, stands between the thought and the words used. Though the sound
of a word can be a factor in choosing it, it must above all carry a meaning
that feels as though it comes close to the thought. Note that this is totally
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 6
a case of “feels right.” The thought is not some word or string of words
that can be compared to what we’re trying to use to express it. The
thought is a thought before it is any words. Therefore, we can only decide
what the right words are on the basis of “feels right.”
Yet as someone pointed out recently, being wrong feels like being
right. So how do you train “feels right” so that it becomes a trustworthy
criterion? That must be a major thing education does. How? Tons of
feedback. You have to be in a thousand situations where you feel like
you’re right and then you are notified, like it or not, either that you’re
demonstrably wrong, or that what feels right to you definitely doesn’t feel
right to other people. It’s mortifying. But it’s education. People write things
because those things feel right to them. They can’t be expected to enjoy
finding out the same writing feels wrong to other people. But if they don’t
get that feedback, they won’t learn anything they don’t already know.
And then, of course, even beyond the hidden thought there is motive:
“Thought is not begotten by thought; it is engendered by motivation, i.e.,
by our desires and needs, our interests and emotions. Behind every
thought there is an attractive-volitional tendency, which holds the answer
to the last ‘why’ in the analysis of thinking. A true and full understanding
of another’s thought is possible only when we understand its affectivevolitional basis.” (252)
“To understand another’s speech, it is not sufficient to understand his
words – we must understand his thought. But even that is not enough –
we must also know its motivation.” (253)
This takes us directly to the territory of writing narrative, especially
fiction. But I can’t start philosophizing about motive in narrative here.
The book ends with this assertion about how consciousness is formed
through the use of language:
“If perceptive consciousness and intellectual consciousness reflect reality
differently, then we have two different forms of consciousness. Thought
and speech turn out to be the key to the nature of human consciousness.
“If language is as old as consciousness itself, and if language is a
practical consciousness-for-others and, consequently, consciousness-formyself, then not only one particular thought but all consciousness is
connected with the development of the word. . . . The word is a direct
expression of the historical nature of human consciousness.” (256, my
emphasis)
Pei - inner speech & teaching writing, 6/16/2010, p. 7
The underlined words state a powerful hypothesis in compressed
form. If I understand them, the hypothesis is that pragmatically, language
is our means of making the contents of our awareness present, existent,
intelligible to others; and it says further that as we constantly use
language in this way, we train ourselves to make the contents of
awareness present to ourselves via this medium. Thus consciousness, or
knowing our own knowing, becomes a language event that has a social
history. If we identify the self with consciousness, and it’s hard not to
since consciousness implies that someone is being aware, then this
argument says that the self is created through a shared use of language.
Vygotsky’s book was published in 1934. This idea has been around
for a long time.
Consider, then, a further consequence of this idea: it follows that
when we teach writing, which is a turning of inner speech into external
language, consciousness-for-others, we are doing something that affects
the making of a self. I would submit that this is a very significant mission
for teaching to have.