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Goffman's SCs are claimed to operate in all communication, including written text. There
are many ways that authors give readers turns. Textbook writers, for example, have subtle
ways of taking the reader's contribution into account – assuming that the reader would have
objected to X, or assuming that the reader has a question Y and the textbook writer answers it.
Summaries at the end of units serve the function of answering the reader's unspoken question,
"What is the most important information, and why is it important?" Conversely, in composition
classes, teachers instruct novice writers to consider their readers as if they were about to ask
not just for summaries but also for definitions, for examples, or other evidence, and even as if
they were about to argue with the writer. That is, written communication is a reciprocal
transaction between the writer and the reader.

4.Acoustically adequate and interpretable messages
Communication requires an ungarbled message. In order for communication to take
place, messages have to be interpretable. They also have to be "bearable." We have all been
at cocktail parties or receptions in crowded rooms where the noise level prohibits message
reception. If messages are garbled, they must be "repaired." If they are not, then other parts of
the communication system break down, and communication grinds to a halt.
The question is What constitutes a clear message? Just how acoustically accurate must
a message be to be "adequate," and what makes a message "interpretable"? How clear must
messages be in order to serve communication?
Sometimes language learners may make many phonological and syntactic errors, and
yet communication takes place.
Gumperz (1979: 15) says that "participants need not agree on the details of what was
meant in any utterance, so long as they have negotiated a common theme or focus."
When people are learning languages, they may have difficulty interpreting messages not
negotiated to their level of competence. There are many ways to deal with this. Some learners
"fake it," pretending to understand and continuing to interact in the hope that they will catch the
theme or focus of the conversation. Consequently, native speakers may judge the learner’s
competence as quite high, when in reality he/she does not understand much of what is said.
Obviously, there are pluses and minuses to the use of faking strategies. Communication
can continue fairly smoothly, but it may also break down completely since information that
allows the participants to build a common theme or focus is missing.
Other learners use backchannel cues to let the speaker know they do not understand.
The speaker then repairs the message. As the talk is negotiated, repairs and readjustments
are made, and the talk becomes simplified to an appropriate level. There are advantages and
disadvantages to this strategy too. The message becomes comprehensible during the repair
process, but both the native speaker and language learner may find the need for constant
negotiation of repairs too burdensome to make the conversation worthwhile. The learner may
then be denied the extended interaction with native speakers that could facilitate language
learning.
There is a whole body of research that looks at the types of adjustments we make when
our messages are not acoustically adequate or interpretable. In conversational analysis, this
includes the study of the "repair" system (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974; Schegloff
1979). In research on language learning, the repairs often lead to special registers such as
"foreigner talk," "teacher talk," or (in the case of language disorder research) "clinician talk."
These registers have many similarities. All show an increase in acoustical accuracy. This
is accomplished by slowing the rate of speech so that there are fewer reduced vowels, fewer