People often underestimate how much is actually lost when spoken word appears in print. A statement can be interpreted several different ways depending on your intonation when you speak and where you put the emphasis but this is often not apparent when your statement appears in print.
For example, while watching television today I caught the tail end of the following commercial:
The first time I saw the advertisment, I just interpreted it as SAP was only for great small companies and not at all for great big companies. Anyone who knows anything about SAP knows that it is used by many Fortune 500 companies and so the previous interpretation has to be incorrect. In actuallity, the marketing campaign is SAP’s effort to go beyond the Fortune 500 market and extend towards medium and small business by saying that their product is not limited to big companies, but all great companies (big and small), something that is not clear right away.
My college professors always told to read my papers out loud once I was done writing them to see if they flowed properly, but we see the exact opposite problem here. What is readily apparent in the spoken word (due to your intonation and emphasis) gets lost when you read it in print, and what could have been a great marketing campaign leaves the viewers confused and uncertain.
