The written word

[Haroon]

Hi
In an interview between a clinician (Psychiatrist) and a patient I listened to the following:

- How do you spend your times nowadays?
-I have been going to a lot of meeting of weight loss support. That's helping me along the way
- Now are you around a lot of people?
- Well, during school I am around a lot of people. The written word and the groups of the weight loss support is considerable amount of people , yes.
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The point is I couldn't locate what does " the written word" refer to.
Any help would be appreciated.

 

[ewie]

Hullo Haroon. The All-Important Question here is: Where did you find this stuff? ~ the whole thing is frankly weird, and sounds like it's been written by someone with only a basic grasp of English

 

[Aardvark01]

- How do you spend your times nowadays?
-I have been going to a lot of meetings for weight loss support. That's helping me along the way
- Now are you around a lot of people?
- Well, during school I am around a lot of people. The written word and the groups of the weight loss support is are a considerable amount of people , yes.
<…>.

Was this spoken in English or has it been translated?

 

[Haroon]

attached a screen shot of the video with the subtitle and transcription. As I mentioned above it is an interview between a clinician and a patient.

 

[ewie]

I'll ask again: Who are these people? are they native speakers? where did you find the video?

 

[Haroon]

The video is part of a paid training course. The man is a clinician and he is a native speaker. The woman is the patient.

 

[pob14]

Well, as ewie said:

the whole thing is frankly weird, and sounds like it's been written by someone with only a basic grasp of English

"The written word" in particular makes no sense at all to me here.

 

[velisarius]

The person being interviewed seems to have trouble communicating, and what he says doesn't make a lot of sense.
The gist of what he is saying is understandable though.

"The written word" means "text" (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.) The fact that what he says doesn't make sense may be significant.

 

[PaulQ]

The transcript is simply that - a transcript. If you ever write an accurate transcript of a normal conversation between native speakers, you will find that it is mostly non-sequiturs, interruptions, umms and errs, side-tracking, irrelevancies and misunderstandings.

There is not enough context, but I would understand "the written word" as "the written instructions/the written guidance, etc.

 

[velisarius]

"The written instructions" is a possibility I hadn't thought of. He mentions "school", so it could be some reference to academic work.