The Evangelistic Outpost was writing and had this:
Note: “Writing,” said Laurence Sterne, “is but a different name for conversation.”
I thought about that in terms of my students’ term papers, because those have been coming in for the last three weeks. (We have two for each class.) And what I told two of them today is, “Yes, when you are talking you don’t have to explain how you got from point A to point B because we assume I know and that if I don’t know, I will ask. But when you are writing you have to make the connections explicit. You don’t want me to have to think about anything. You want to write so smoothly that it just seems to flow.”
So writing may be a different name for conversation, but it’s a different kind of conversation.