Discourse analysis is the study of language and its relationship to context. It focuses on what people mean rather than just what they say or write. Discourse analysis considers cultural background, register, text structure, communicative competence, pragmatics, social construction of reality, situated identities, performance, and intertextuality. Spoken discourse differs from written discourse in terms of grammatical intricacy, lexical density, contextualization, spontaneity, nominalization, explicitness, repetition, hesitation, and redundancy.