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A Better Pencil

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Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution

A Better Pencil is a study that traces the relationships between writing and reading and the technology used as the medium of communication – from the invention of writing, the development of the printing press, then the typewriter, to the modern computer.

It’s a book about how the digital revolution is impacting our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies of the word differ from what came before.

A Better Pencil - book jacketIn this sense Dennis Baron has produced a similar work to that of his namesake Naomi Baron’s Alphabet to Email though his emphasis is less on historical development and more on exploring topics related to the issue. In fact I was rather glad he didn’t take a strictly chronological approach, which would have delayed annoyingly any revelations he might have about electronic writing. But the problem with his thematic structure is that many of his observations are made over and over again, each one of which he seems to imagine to be the first.

The one basic argument which he repeats is that each development in the technology of literacy was at first introduction regarded with suspicion. Even writing itself, which it was thought (by Plato) would lead to the decline of human memory. Then printing, which some people opposed on the grounds that it would lead to the dissemination of new ideas and the loss of respect for the authority of the church – and they were right.

What he’s doing in fact is looking at commonly held notions about computer technology and trying to dissipate widespread fears and misconceptions. Will computers lead to a decline in literacy. Answer – No. Will they rot our children’s brains – no. And so on.

The idea that some people are suspicious of technology is examined at some length by a study of the Unabomber – the technophobe terrorist who was ironically caught out only when he published his manifesto. The story is well told, and it’s entertaining enough – but it tells us almost nothing about writing or technology that we didn’t already know. However, this is a book that becomes more interesting as it goes on.

There’s quite a good chapter on the history of the pencil (much of it taken from the work of Henry Petrowski) that throws up quite a few interesting observations. He argues for instance that writing in pencil lacks status because the pencil post-dates the pen in historical development. Its traces can be wiped out of course, yet some pencils do not have erasers – for very good reasons. Joiners don’t want to leave graphite smears on their work, and golfers should not alter their scores.

It doesn’t take us much closer to electronic writing, but there’s a very amusing chapter on handwriting in which he exposes the bogus claims of graphologists (sloping left script = suicidal tendencies: that sort of rubbish). He makes the more serious point that people repeatedly claim current handwriting practice is a falling off in standards from some previous golden era in which everybody wrote in beautiful copperplate script. This too just isn’t true.

Once he gets to word-processors all his lines of argument begin to come together. Anyone who has followed the development of writing with a PC will be fondly reminded of the early frustrations as he describes his experiences using VAX, WordStar, and WordPerfect. As he rightly claims, all new developments in writing technology seem to slow down the writing process when they are first introduced.

He looks at the conventions, plus the advantages and disadvantages of all forms of on-screen writing – email, web pages, Instant Messaging, and blogs. Each of these has so rapidly replaced its predecessors that the conventions often change with the matter of a few years. Something hip with the kids one moment becomes old hat the next – particularly when adults get involved. That’s happening on Facebook and Twitter right now.

Most of these are new opportunities for self-expression rather than new writing technologies – though he might have included text messaging as an almost coded form of communication. Wikis are also new in that they are anonymous user-generated writing in which individual contributors sacrifice notions of personal authorship for the sake of a common good.

He ends with a look at what he calls the ‘dark side of the web’ – the world of hate groups, email scams, and political censorship. I was glad he didn’t let the illustrious Google off the hook for the way in which they (and MSN) have capitulated to China, the world’s leader in state-sponsored cyber snooping (with an estimated 30,000 people employed in spying on their fellow citizens). And they’re not alone: Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Burma (Myanmar) are doing the same thing.

One of Baron’s other central arguments is that revolutions in our writing behaviour take place when the technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous enough to put new tools in everybody’s hands. Things are moving so fast in digital technology just at the moment that it’s hard to keep up or predict what might happen next. But this survey is an excellent account of the status quo at 2008/2009.

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© Roy Johnson 2009

Dennis Baron, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.259, ISBN: 0195388445

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Handwriting of the Twentieth Century

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history and development of modern graphology

Rosemary Sassoon is a distinguished expert on handwriting, and a typographist celebrated for her font Sassoon Prima, which helps young school pupils learn to read and write. In her latest book, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, she looks at the effects which various teaching methods and models of good practice have had in the period from 1900 to the present. She charts developments in the teaching and study of handwriting, showing how changing educational policies, economic forces and technological advance have combined to alter the priorities and form of handwriting.

Handwriting of the Twentieth Century Every page is suffused with a love of her subject and a concern for the people she is writing about. This ‘long and sometimes sorry story’ tells also of the sheer pain and hard work of children forced to follow the style of the day, and of the reformers who have sought to simplify the teaching and learning of handwriting.

What emerges very clearly is that handwriting styles pass through various fashions and styles – which is why we can put a rough date on examples – even including our own. The general process she illustrates is one of a gradual move from the ornate copperplate of the Victorian period, to various forms of cursive Italic which are common now.

The book is beautifully illustrated throughout with examples from copybooks and personal handwriting from across the world. She ends with a comparative study of developments in continental Europe and America during the same period – and where the lessons to be learned are exactly the same.

This book is a historical record of techniques, styles and methods. But it also a passionate study of everyday typography, informed by a deep knowledge of her subject. It will be of interest to educationalists, people in teacher training, plus cultural sociologists and historians – as well as typographists and graphologists.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Rosemary Sassoon, Handwriting of the Twentieth Century, Bristol: Intellect, 2007, pp.208, ISBN: 0415178827

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How We Write

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a study of the creative process

If you are interested in the process of writing – the means by which we think of ideas, translate them into words, and record them as text – then this is a book you will not want to miss. Mike Sharples deals with some of the central paradoxes in this most intellectualised form of culture. For instance, he considers how writing is a demanding mental activity, yet some people appear to write easily; how it demands the constraints of grammar, yet creative writers break these rules; how most writing involves planning, yet it also makes use of ‘inspiration’ and chance discovery in the process of composition.

How We WriteThese are conundrums to which he offers interesting solutions, based upon the central notion of the writer as a ‘creative designer’. He starts with the ways in which ideas and narratives are conceptualized before they are committed to paper. Then he pursues the notion of creativity acting to produce results which are intelligible and acceptable, because they are enacted within a series of cultural constraints. The very encouraging part of this analysis is that as he points out, creativity is not something rare, but is quite normal. There are qualitative differences in the results, to be sure, but most ordinary people can come up with ideas, given a problem.

Next he deals with ‘Writing as design’ – which considers the physical context in which writing takes place, with some interesting comparisons between writing and and architectural design. He writes eloquently on the psychological pleasures of writing with a pencil – then goes on to compare the advantages of writing using different media – including word-processors.

Given that he obviously wishes to get close to the writing process, it’s slightly surprising that he doesn’t examine author’s notebooks, manuscripts and revisions. There are plenty of examples (Henry James, Virginia Woolf) where we can get fairly close to the creative process – though he does at one point look at some of Wordsworth’s drafts of his poetry.

He identifies three activities as essential to the writing process – planning, composing, and revising. Not surprisingly, as an academic he is a firm believer in planning, and he describes the advantages and shortcomings of lists, mind mapping, and outlining:

A draft text is itself a plan for further writing and…composing a free and unconstrained draft and then organising this into a more coherent text is one successful approach to writing.

On the process of composition he makes a brave attempt to deal with what constitutes good style, and practitioners of creative writing will be interested in what he says about how narratives are structured and developed. Dealing with the revision process, he encouragingly points out that writers are privileged in being able to revise their products so easily – unlike architects and sculptors for instance – and the advent of the word processor has made this process very easy indeed.

He also observes that experienced writers usually revise their work at a structural as well as a surface level – whereas the less experienced merely make changes at word and sentence level.

There are some interesting tips on making this process of revision easier – to which I would have added the best advice I have come across – edit in separate passes through the text for different purposes – because it’s less tiring than trying to keep several issues in mind at once.

The various strategies of creative writing are discussed using the metaphors of planning, building, discovering, and exploring. These analogies are thought-provoking, but it is quotations from practising writers which bring the arguments to life. This actually becomes a consideration of the psychology of writing, and the often pathological connection between creativity and depression, anxiety, and even suicide.

Next he deals with what he calls the materiality of the text – how it is printed and laid out. This involves choice of typeface, use of space, page layout, text decoration, and all the other aspects of what is printed and how it affects our interpretation of what we read.

This is a quasi-marxist form of interpretation which considers the relationship between writing and the society in which it is produced and read. He invokes the Russian formalist Bahktin and post-Structuralist literary theorists to argue that texts may not have fixed meanings, and that writers negotiate (even if unconsciously) with the cultural and moral frameworks of the societies in which they live.

A penultimate chapter on the various forms of collaborative writing will be of interest to those concerned with scientific writing – one of the few areas in which it is still regularly practised. And he ends, logically enough, with the new possibilities opened up by the digitization of text and electronic writing. Apart from writing for the Web, this involves the possibilities of hypertext fiction, writing in MOOs, and voice recognition as possible spurs to creativity.

The writing is fluent and accessible throughout. This is a humane and thought-provoking book which operates successfully at a number of levels. It offers wise counsel to aspiring writers; fresh approaches to the more experienced; and even new paths to be explored for those in academic research studying the relationship between thinking and its presentation as the written word.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Mike Sharples, How We Write: Writing as creative design, London: Routledge, 1999, pp.224, ISBN: 0415185874

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Orality and Literacy

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Speaking, Writing, Technology, and the Mind

Orality and Literacy has become a classic since it was first published in 1982. It is concerned with the differences between oral and literary cultures. In making this exploration, it throws light onto the essential elements of writing which will be of interest to anyone concerned with the process at a theoretical or deeper level. It starts with the observation that speech and writing are two separate systems, and that ‘oral literature’ is a contradiction in terms. Much of the early argument deals with the issues of ‘authorship’ of Homer’s two epics The Odyssey and The Iliad. Were they written or spoken?

Orality and LiteracyHe suggests a fundamental difference in oral culture and its dependence on formulas, cliche, and kennings. Not an oak tree, but ‘the noble oak’; not the Mediterranean, but ‘the wine dark sea’. He also makes interesting use of the work of the Soviet psychologist Luria [also recommended by neurologist Oliver Sacks] to demonstrate the non-abstract thinking of people in oral cultures.

You’ve got to be prepared for some abstract but often delightful language in his expression. Terms such as ‘verbomotor lifestyle’, ‘chirographic culture’, and ‘noetic economy’ nestle alongside some compressed reflections on language, time, space, and our sense of self.

The second part of the book deals with the relationship between consciousness, writing, and technology from the relatively recent 3500 BC onwards. He explains the importance of the alphabet (a one-off invention) and even argues that writing down words – as distinct from speaking them – has an effect on our thought process.

without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its true potential, cannot produce … beautiful and powerful creations

His comments on the relationship between writing and the body (headings, chapters, footers) are wonderfully suggestive, as are his observations on the fictionality of the addressee in personal diaries. He also dives into the pedagogical debates on language, arguing cogently that whilst all dialects are potentially equal in that they must use the same grammar, it is bad practice not to urge exposure to the full grapholect of the written language, which has “infinitely more resources”

En passant, there’s a very good account of classical rhetoric (antinomasia, paradiastole) which explains why this was important to classical Greeks. He even has an explanation for the importance of female authors in the rise of the novel.

Next comes the importance of space in the rise of print, and the origin and significance of things we take for granted – such as title and content pages, indexes, paragraphs, even page numbers. These further separate print from oral culture and make the book less of a recording of something spoken, more an object in its own right.

The latter parts of the book take his observations into the realm of literature and criticism, using the examples of narrative, closure, and character to illustrate the changes from an oral to a print culture.

He ends with what he calls ‘theorems’ – topics for further consideration in the orality-literacy shift. These include literary history, New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Reader-response Theory.

This is a book which throws off thought-provoking ideas on every page. It has been inexplicably out of print for some time. If you are interested in the psychology or the philosophy of what it means to produce writing on paper or screen – get a copy now.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, London: Routledge, 2002, pp.204, ISBN: 0415281294

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Student Writing in Higher Education

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essays on problems and solutions for academic writing

Student Writing in Higher Education is a collection of academic research papers which reflect the work being done in what the editors call the ‘new contexts’ of higher education. By this they mean the writing which goes on in non-traditional subjects such as dance or computer conferencing, as well as the new types of writing such as ‘journals of learning’ and ’empathetic writing’ which are now used in a number of subjects.

Student Writing in Higher EducationThe essays deal with many of the problems faced by typical students – the unspecified audiences for which they are expected to write; the debate about skills-based writing tuition versus ‘writing in context’; and the new problems created by the collapse of traditional subject boundaries.

There is an interesting paper which analyses tutor feedback on students’ written work. This includes some scandalous examples of marking which offer nothing more than marginal ticks and an overall grade. As the authors chillingly observe:

Those tutors who give minimal responses perhaps see the task of reading students’ writing as largely administrative, and/or do not consider students to have the sort of role in the academic community which merits engaging in dialogue with them.”

This chapter should be required reading for departmental heads and anybody with a responsibility for training tutors in marking skills.

A chapter on academic writing in the study of dance throws up the fundamental problem that not all subjects make the same types of intellectual demand. Terpsichoreans are allowed to describe their own practice and reflect upon the Self in a way which would be unthinkable in traditional disciplines. The same seems to be true of ‘Reflective Learning Journals’ in anthropology [which includes the example of a Death Journal!] – though at least these have as a primary function encouraging students to think about interdisciplinary studies and ‘map’ their experiences of learning.

There’s also an interesting chapter on the new use of computer conferencing, with two Open University courses as examples. This throws up the problems of asynchronous and informal academic discourse, as well as the potentially ambiguous role of tutors, who can act as ‘fellow participants’ or as ‘knowledge holders’.

One of the persistent weaknesses of these papers is that they often don’t seem to reach any conclusion or have very much to offer by way of insight. As one contributor observes: ‘I am aware that this chapter has raised questions which have not been answered’. I was also surprised by the amount of heavy signposting – such as a chapter whose final paragraphs begin ‘To conclude this chapter I turn finally to issues of pedagogy…’. The other surprise is that so few – almost none – of the studies actually deal with or quote any of the very subject under consideration – student writing itself.

One of the most interesting chapters is – perhaps strategically – the last, in which Barry Stierer describes the plurality of writing demands in the Open University’s MA in Education. It’s interesting that a careful explanation of the pedagogic requirements of a well-constructed course are more interesting than any amount of strangulated theorising about ‘epistemic modality’ and ‘intrinsic and embodied readings’.

The editors make it clear that they concentrate specifically on the implications of their research for the work of teachers rather than students. In fact this collection will be of most interest to those in the field of educational research striving to generate publications for the next Research Assessment Exercise. But there are also some practical lessons and observations which might actually help those tutors interested in improving students’ writing skills.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Mary R. Lea and Barry Stierer, Student Writing in Higher Education, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, 2000, pp. 205, ISBN: 0335204074

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The History and Power of Writing

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the printed word from antiquity to the present

I’m amazed this book isn’t better known – though I’ve only just discovered it myself. The History and Power of Writing is a majestic, scholarly, and multi-disciplined study of the history of writing. Henri-Jean Martin traces the development of writing from Mesopotamia in 5,000 BC to digital technology of the last two decades. The history is recounted in astonishing detail, and the pace is quite slow. You will have to be a patient reader. He traces how writing styles changed according to the implements used; how the writing surface was made from papyrus, parchment, and paper; and how ‘books’ were assembled in the form of the scroll, the volumen, and then the codex.

The History and Power of WritingAll these apparently simple technological changes produced immense social effects – all of which he examines in impressive detail. He also reveals the relationship between speech, reading, and writing, which until fairly recently was more complex than we might imagine. There were, for instance, three ways of reading a text for Latin scholars – silently (rare) as a form of sub-vocalised or murmured speech (common), and reading out loud (most common).

His study takes in wide-ranging aspects of classical antiquity – politics, commerce, jurisprudence, scholarship, literature, plus anything else which has left traces of its history in the form of writing, such as taxation and legal contracts.

There are all sorts of unforeseen spin-offs and intellectual byways – ecclesiastical practises, medieval poetry recitations, the development of the postal service, tax systems, plus the history of the Bible and the development of Christianity.

One of his key arguments is that all sorts of other developments led up to the invention of printing: the creation of the ‘new’ universities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the development of new paper-making techniques; plus copperplate engraving. And the volume of closely referenced evidence he brings to bear to support his arguments is so overwhelming, it would be a brave scholar who challenged any of his claims.

Even taking the translation into account, he takes no prisoners so far as his intellectual pitch is concerned:

Like cuneiform characters, hieroglyphs can have the value of ideograms, phonograms, or determinatives. The sign for the sun-god provides a simple example. Since the ideogram (the solar disc) might cause confusion because it also meant ‘day’ and was thus a polyphone, two phonograms were added to it, a human mouth for r and a forearm in profile for the aspirated laryngeal consonant ayin, thus providing the consonantal skeleton of the name (a third and final consonant was left out).

Nevertheless, this certainly ranks alongside Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space as a seminal text on the nature of writing. If there’s a single weakness, its the shortage of illustrations.

As soon as the printed book becomes the most popular vehicle for writing to circulate, the subject expands to include typography, page design, book structure, and even the ideology of font sets,
This in its turn leads on to printing, publishing, and the book trade in general, plus a consideration of reading habits, of pirating works, and of censorship.

There’s a whole chapter devoted the contents of Renaissance libraries, which books people actually read, the establishment of private libraries throughout Europe, and even speculations about the manner in which people did their reading:

Petrarch devoutly kissed his copy of Virgil before opening it; Erasmus did the same for his Cicero; and in the evening, when he had finished his day’s work, Machiavelli put on his best clothes to read his favourite authors.

In the ‘modern’ period (1500—1800) the forms and functions of writing are firmly wrapped up in finance and trading, ecclesiastical history and public records.

You’ve got to be prepared for lots of political, social, and economic history – but this is what gives the book its depth, because this material provides the background and reasons for changes in writing, reading, and literacy in general.

There are also detours into related areas. His account of the nineteenth century for instance is largely concerned with the development of printing technology, the reproduction of illustrations and photographs, and most of all, the development of the press as a vehicle for independent criticism of the state.

When we reach the twentieth century this generalised approach to communication spreads out even wider to include telegraphy, stenography, audio recording, moving pictures, and eventually, in rapid succession, radio, television, and the computer. Although Martin looks in detail at the problems of information overload created by new media, he rather tantalisingly stops short of the explosion of the last fifteen years since the development of the Web.

This is a panoptic and encyclopedic study, any one of whose myriad side issues could fill a normal-sized book. It ought to be more widely known amongst scholars. If you don’t yet know it, a treasure trove of history and idea lies waiting for you.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, trns. Lynda G. Cochrane, pp.591, ISBN 0226508366

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The Psychology of Writing

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attitudes to writing amongst professional authors

Anyone who has attempted to produce a piece of half-way serious writing will know that the psychological states we go through can range from anxious anticipation, thoughtful cogitation, through anguished production, to teeth-gnashing editing and re-writes. Ronald Kellog’s excellent study The Psychology of Writing examines every one of these stages in the process. The structure of the book follows the development of writing from its (sometime) origin in thought, through pre-writing and planning [very thoroughly explored] to the varieties of text production and the psychological states which sometimes assist it (including trance and alcohol abuse).

Writing a letterHis method in each chapter is to launch the topic theoretically (Knowledge, Writing Strategies) then discuss empirical and anecdotal evidence, and finally inspect the scientific research. Some of the results are of the uninspiring ‘47% did, 53% didn’t’ variety, but the result is commendably thorough. He draws on many types of writing for his examples, yet keeps coming back (for understandable reasons) to creative writing. Why then in the attempts to ‘measure’ or explain quality in writing didn’t the exceptions to his claims not occur to him? Yes – most writers need long and hard-earned experience, and practice and skill development. But how does one explain the Rimbauds, Chattertons, and Keats of this world who were producing masterpieces at an age when the rest of us were struggling with our ‘A’ levels?

I would guess that those following this line of psychological research might profit from taking (for example) concepts such as the intentional and the affective fallacy into account. There also seemed to be an unspoken assumption that the writer and reader are part of what the literary critic Stanley Fish calls the same ‘interpretive community’. A quick dose of deconstruction might not go amiss in helping to shake this idea a little.

Some of the jargon might be accessible to psychologists, but I can’t help feeling that terms such as ‘relative automatization’ and ‘satisficing [sic] heuristic’ will deter many potential readers. On the other hand there were occasional inspired flashes which I wished could have been developed further – on plagiarism, ideas processors and ‘invisible writing’ for instance.

Even though the prose was rather dry and the argument occasionally sagged in ploughing its way through the data, everything perked up again with the concluding chapters. The scholarship throughout is exemplary, and the book is rounded off with a magnificent bibliography and a good index. Computer users may be interested to know that there are chapters dealing with word-processing packages and outliners – as well as programmes which cause the screen to flash if your writing slows down!

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Ronald T. Kellog, The Psychology of Writing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp.253, ISBN: 0195081390

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The Story of Writing

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deciphering the earliest written languages

The Story of Writing will be of interest to anybody interested in the graphical presentation of language. It’s very much a coffee table volume – profusely illustrated and printed on glossy art paper, though Andrew Robinson does spend much of his time wading in archaeological detail. He doesn’t claim to be a specialist, and one suspects from time to time that he is offering a digest of other people’s work for which he has an amateur enthusiasm.

The Story of Writing In fact his title is somewhat misleading, because his book doesn’t really trace the development of writing. Instead, after making a few observations on pictographs, logograms, rebuses and various other forms of what he calls ‘proto-writing’, the centre of the book deals with four famous cases of decipherment. These are the historical struggles to decode Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B, and Mayan Glyphs.

And very interesting the accounts are too – each one a case of scholarly sleuths working against the odds, and each one cracked surprisingly recently (though there are others which still elude interpretation). Some of his exposition is extremely technical, and rather at odds with the populist presentation in which each topic is delivered in double- page spreads. The book also ends rather arbitrarily with a discussion of Chinese and Japanese writing (“the most complicated writing in the world”) and the political dilemmas surrounding computerisation and the temptations of the Roman alphabet.

It’s the sort of publication which would probably be most used in a departmental or college library, but if somebody gave you a copy as a birthday present you wouldn’t exactly be disappointed.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing, London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp.224, ISBN 0500281564

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Writing – how to understand it

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Writing – definition

redbtn Writing is the use of visual symbols which act as a code for communication between individuals or groups.

redbtn Writing and speech are the two main language varieties.

Examples

redbtn Writing is a material form of communication which can comprise:

handwriting on paper
carving on wood, stone, or metal
electronic writing on screen or disk
printed lettering on public signs

Use

writing Writing and speech should usefully be regarded as two entirely separate systems.

redbtn Writing has to be acquired as a skill in the same way as driving, sewing and cooking are learnt.

redbtn Speech is acquired by means of innate programming, in the same way as we grow taller or acquire a second set of teeth.

redbtn The code of written language consists of letter-forms [the alphabet] used to form a visual approximation of spoken words.

redbtn These words are formed in accordance with the conventions of spelling, then combined using the rules of grammar and syntax to form meaningful statements.

redbtn Writing is a code or a set of symbols which serve to produce material forms of communication.

redbtn It is interesting to consider the differences between speech and writing:

redbtn Writing can be preserved indefinitely, whereas speech is transient unless it is deliberately recorded.

redbtn Writing is usually a solitary act of communication, whereas speech is a social act.

redbtn Writing expects a delay in reply, whereas speech usually solicits an immediate response.

redbtn Writing does not contain non-verbal gesture, whereas speech employs non-verbal gesture constantly.

redbtn Writing is often drafted, so that the audience receives an edited version. With speech, the audience hears the first attempt with all its faulty starts, hesitations, contradictions and corrections.

redbtn Writing is pre-planned, whereas speech is usually spontaneous.

redbtn Writing and speech have discrete functions in society. Speech is more appropriate for some purposes, whereas writing is more appropriate for others.

  • a lengthy shopping list is better written down
  • a job interview is better conducted verbally, but accompanied by written notes
  • a wedding invitation is usually written because it contains lots of factual details

redbtn No language can have an exact correlationship in terms of its speech and its writing. English is no exception to this principle.

redbtn It is important to appreciate [and worth repeating] that writing is an arbitrary code and as such is learnt separately from speech.

redbtn A competent literate person usually has little difficulty in reading, comprehension, or pronunciation.

redbtn One important reason for the disparity between pronunciation and spelling is the fact that written language stays relatively fixed, whereas the spoken language is always developing rapidly.

redbtn The spoken language is alive, and therefore grows and develops from moment to moment. Pronunciation styles alter and shift, as does the lexicon of the language. Terms and idioms are imported from various societies whose pronunciation differs greatly from our own.

Self-assessment quiz follows >>>

© Roy Johnson 2004

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