WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT WRITING?

Well, for one thing it allows you to communicate with people that you’re not sitting in the same room with at the time. You can communicate with people who are thousands of miles away. You can benefit from the thoughts of people who lived before you were born. Other people can benefit from the things that you say after your dead. You can accumulate the wisdom of thousands of people that you’d never be able to meet in you own lifetime. And all of the achievements of modern civilization: science, arts, letters, history, would be impossible if we all relied on the oration of the elders in a particular social group.

Another advantage of writing is that it sits there on the page and you can examine it. If you didn’t put together a string of words that conveys the exact meaning that you wanted to get across, you can revise it; you can cross words out and stick in better ones, or shorten the sentence to make it easier for people to understand. If you’re doing everything in real time, than it’s much harder to ensure that the complex concepts you may want to communicate really are being communicated by your choice of words then and there.

If writing is so great, why do we still talk? Why don’t we convey all our ideas by passing notes back and forth? Well one reason is that writing is time consuming. You’ve got to compose the words, and it’s much more cumbersome to get all of those bones and muscles in your hand smearing ink on a page than to just wiggle little bits of flesh in your mouth and shape a sound wave.

Also every normal person knows how to speak and listen, whereas for reading and writing, you have to go to school and children have to be old enough to have mastered reading.

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SPEAKING VS. WRITING

As far as we know, we’ve had language ever since we’ve been human, and we’ve had story telling ever since we’ve been human. The reason that we suspect that, even though we can’t go back in a time machine and see what people sounded like fifty or a hundred thousand years ago, is that all human societies, no matter how remote the corner of the world they were found, have language and tell each other stories. Anthropologists and missionaries and colonists exploring the remote corners of the world in the nineteenth century would often come across people who lacked writing, who lacked farming, who lacked all kinds of technologies. But they never found any tribe anywhere on the planet that lacked spoken language. No one knows how far back spoken language goes, but the fact that you can find spoken language in all of the world’s six thousand cultures suggests that it must have been there at the time of the ancestral band of humans, before they started to split up and colonize different parts of the world. That would take us back at least fifty thousand years, probably much longer.

Writing is a relative newcomer. As far as we know, the first writing system was only invented around 5500 years ago, which is really a fraction of the amount of time that our species has been on the planet, and even a smaller fraction of the time that our genus homo has been on the planet. It was invented, as far as we can tell, in a small number of places on earth.

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THE INVENTION OF WRITING

We have a saying that necessity is the mother of invention, but necessity doesn’t guarantee that invention will take place. You would think that writing is so useful – it allows us to learn from people we have never met, from people who lived before we did, from people who live thousands of miles away – that all societies would have hit upon the idea of writing down language.

But it happened a surprisingly small number of times in human history, and I think archaeologists believe that writing tends to be invented in societies of agriculture that have to keep track of quantities of crops. You might have a big storehouse where every farmer would store his grain at the beginning of the season and then come back later on to claim it, and you’ve got to keep track of which farmer contributed how much grain. So you need some way of putting down quantities that doesn’t exceed human memory. That kind of record keeping is thought to be the ancestor of writing systems.

A writing system, unlike a language system, isn’t something that nature gave us. There’s reason to think that humans are, in some sense, wired for sound, that every normal human brain has the capacity to acquire language from other people, when we were children. That doesn’t seem to be true for writing. We evolved in a world that didn’t have paper or pencil, or even papyrus or stone tablet. We didn’t have a complex society with agricultural surpluses that had to be recorded. The world that we lived in was one of bands of 25 to 50 people in which you pretty much knew everyone who was important to you and speech satisfied the demands of everyday life. Evolution seems to have stopped at the point where our brains evolved to be able to communicate via speech.

Regardless of why the first societies needed a writing system, inventing it was not so easy. A writing system is an intricate contraption like the internal combustion engine, or the microscope, that couldn’t just be the brainchild of one person exercising his genius. Writing systems evolved over many centuries, sometimes millennia, because it’s so hard to solve the problem of getting language down on the page.

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PUTTING LANGUAGE ON THE PAGE

There are lots of ways in which people use printed characters to convey messages. We’ve got the knife and fork symbol to let motorists know that there’s a restaurant there, we’ve got the figure with the straight sides and the figure with the little triangle to distinguish the men’s room from the ladies room. But the power of a real writing system is that it allows us to take advantage of the power of language. The great thing about language is that we don’t just blurt out words for single thoughts like “stop”, “go”, “ladies room”, “men’s room”, but we can convey new combinations of ideas; we can talk about not just a dog biting a man, but a man biting a dog. We can talk about the cow jumping over the moon, and the dish running away with the spoon, we can talk about a big bang creating the universe. Language is a combinatorial system, and a true writing system allows you to use that combinatorial system to express new ideas in writing.

If you’re going to try to put language down on a page, there are a lot of ways in which you can make hunks of language correspond to squiggles on a page. There are a lot of different choices you could have – one symbol per sentence or one symbol per word, or part of a word for a symbol. Each squiggle on the page can stand for what linguists call a phoneme, namely a vowel or consonant. They can also stand for syllables; they can also stand for morphemes – that is chunks of sound and meaning that go together like “cat” or “pup”. Almost all languages use one of those three linguistic units.

If you were inventing a writing system you might think, well I’ll start off by having one symbol for every word. But there are a lot of problems with that. One of them is, there are lots and lots of words in a language, a typical English speaker knows fifty thousand words. Fifty thousand arbitrary squiggles is an awful lot to learn. Also, we form new words all the time. We combine bits of words to form bigger words, like “pinkness” or “religiosity”. New words enter the language like to “mosh”, to “dis”, to “spam”. If every word had its own character then you’d have to go back to school every time someone came up with a new word. You really want your written characters to correspond to something smaller than a word, so that when new words come about, people instantly are able to read them.

A syllable is more or less a vowel and the consonants that are pronounced with it in a unit of timing, so “university” has the syllables u – ni – ver – si – ty. Each one of them has a vowel; each one of them may have some consonants stuck onto it. People who know how to read and write in an alphabetic system think of syllables as being composed of a consonant and a vowel, “ga” is “g” and “a”. But if you were actually to look at the sound wave of a syllable, there isn’t one point where the consonant ends and the vowel begins, they are largely smeared together. We hear them as a unit, and it’s really quite an intellectual feat to realize that a syllable is composed of, in some sense, a consonant and a vowel.

There are many languages that do have symbols that correspond to syllables; Japanese is one of them. That’s feasible in a language where the number of possible syllables is restricted, and words are formed by stringing together lots and lots of syllables.

In English we have very complicated syllables. We don’t just have “ga”, and “ca”, and “ta”, but we also have “tra”, and “stra”. We have words like “sixths”, where a single syllable is encrusted with big clumps of consonants in the beginning and at the end. If we had to have a different symbol for every possible English syllable, there would be thousands of them, and that’s too many to memorize. In English we have an alphabet. Our squiggles on the page correspond more or less to vowels and consonants. That isn’t always true, but that’s the basic logic of the system that we use for writing.

People used to think that there was a evolutionary progression in the development of writing systems, they start off with something concrete and primitive, and childlike, like little pictures or cartoons that look like the things they represent, then you advance to more abstract symbols for words, then you have symbols for syllables, and finally you culminate in the system that we enjoy, namely alphabets where every vowel or consonant gets its own squiggle. That isn’t really the way it works, largely because different alphabets are better or worse suited to different languages.

As far as we know, alphabetic writing, in which each mark on the page stands for one vowel or consonant, was invented perhaps 3700 years ago. And as best we can tell, all of the alphabetic writing systems on the planet were descendants of that original system invented by the Canaanites.

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LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE

The American educational system is often very romantic, assuming that children have such a natural desire to learn that all they need is the right environment and it will spontaneously blossom, whereas a lot of things that are worthwhile such as learning to read involve a fair amount of hard work and well thought out instructions. There’s a popular idea in many American school systems that children should learn to read in the same way they learn to speak, namely by being immersed in an environment that’s rich in text and books and letters, and they’ll just soak it up and instinctively begin to read and write the same they soak up speech and instinctively learn to speak and understand.

But reading and writing are very different. Children don’t spontaneously learn to read and write, and most societies in human history and pre-history have not had language in its written form. It suggests that reading and writing are quite unnatural, and won’t naturally emerge just by putting a child in an environment in which there are books all over the place.

The teaching of reading is controversial. We’ve had the language wars in this country over how to best teach kids to read. There have been the proponents of the look-say method in which children are supposed to pick up on the shape of an entire word. That was the idea behind those dreadfully boring Dick and Jane readers that I grew up with. There’s the whole language method in which children are immersed in a text rich environment and are spontaneously supposed to pick up on the ability to read the way they spontaneously learn to speak. There’s the method of phonics, in which children are drilled on correspondences between sounds and letters of the alphabet.

I think that any successful reading technique has to begin with an understanding of the logic of our alphabet, and also has to recognize that learning to read is not like learning to speak. Spoken language is, in some sense, a birth right of our species, all humans naturally learn to speak, all human societies have spoken language. Learning to read is very difficult. There’s no reason to believe that our species has a natural knack for it. Children learn to speak in a very different way than they learn to write.

The child learning to read has to make a number of pretty spectacular mental leaps. First of all they just have to get the concept that these evanescent events called speech sounds, words, and sentences, can actually be put down as patterns of ink on a piece of paper, and that you can look at something which is just lines on a page, and call to mind the sounds of speech. So that’s one leap.

Another one is that in the case of alphabetic writing systems, like the one that we have in English, you’ve got to mentally chop a word into the pieces that correspond to those squiggles on a page. The word “cat” for example is written as three different symbols: “C”, “A”, and “T”. You might even think that it’s pronounced as three sounds, but it really isn’t. If you were to look at the speech wave form of a person pronouncing cat, it doesn’t have a piece corresponding to “C”, followed by a piece corresponding to “A”, followed by a piece corresponding to “T”, but they’re smeared over the entire wave form. It’s an illusion that “cat” even consists of three distinct sounds. In order to learn what “C”, “A”, and “T” correspond to, you’ve got to mentally chop that sound into units that aren’t really out there in the world, but are deeply buried in the organization of language in the brain.

When you listen to speech, there are parts of the brain that respond to the sounds of language, to particular words, to words strung together into phrases and sentences. When you read, all of those parts of the brain are active, plus there are additional parts that seem to respond to the written forms of the words themselves. Writing and speaking, as far as the brain is concerned are different things. Writing involves the brain activity that we exercise when we listen to speech, but it also involves some extra processes that are involved in recognizing the words and looking up what they mean.

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ENGLISH

English spelling is notoriously quirky and illogical, and many people have seen poems that make that point, like

xxxxx Beware of heard,

xxxxx a dreadful word,

xxxxx that looks like beard

xxxxx and sounds like bird

and it goes on from there. The same letter can have different sounds, the same sound can have different letters, we’ve got silent letters, we’ve got exceptions like “of” and “eye”, and so on.

There are many reasons that English spelling doesn’t reflect sound accurately. Some of them are just historical. For example, the reason that we have those useless letters in a word like “nightingale” is that they reflect the way the word used to be pronounced: “nig-ten-gal-a.” Pronunciation changes continuously, spelling systems don’t often catch up, and so we continue to spell the word the way it used to be pronounced, and now it is a historical quirk. Also, people change their pronunciation depending on the context, and you don’t always want to change the spelling to keep track of the pronunciation.

Likewise, pronunciation differs in different parts of the English-speaking world. People in Boston and New York and London drop R’s; people in Montreal and Minneapolis don’t. I pronounced “often” and “orphan” differently, but people in Boston may not. If spelling were logical in the sense that it reflected exactly the way people speak, then you’d have to have one spelling system in Minneapolis, and another one in Boston.

Another reason that we don’t spell things the way they’re pronounced is that the purpose of spelling isn’t just to convey sound, nut also to convey the identities of words. So lets take the word recede, that can be spelled in two different ways, “r-e-c-e-d-e”, and “r-e-s-e-e-d”, as in seeding a lawn a second time. Its good to convey that difference, because in one case we’ve got a recession, in another case we’ve got a reseeding, and by having the spelling fall out of whack with the pronunciation we can convey more abstract information like exactly what word we have in mind when we write it down on a page.

Another reason that English spelling is so crazy is that, in a sense, English isn’t one language, but its two languages squished together. The reason is that English started off as a dialect of Germen, it was called Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. But then in 1066, the Norman French invaded from Normandy, William the Conqueror took over the British Isles. French became the language of the aristocracy, and although English eventually reasserted itself, the language absorbed literally thousands of words from French, which then became part of the standard language. The French and Latin influence increased further when academics, theologians, and religious people began to incorporate Latin words from the liturgy or from ancient texts. So English is a mongrel of Latinate and French words grafted on top of a basically Germanic language, and our spelling system reflects some of that mixed parentage.

English spelling is such an intellectual challenge that we turned in into a sport; we call it the spelling bee. Other languages in which the spelling is so predictable from the pronunciation that if you learn to spell at all, you can do it for every word in the language, such as in Finnish, wouldn’t make for a very good spelling bee, because everyone would ace it.

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RULES

When you learn to write, you learn all kinds of rules; some of the rules are rules of grammar and style that distinguish the formal written version of language from the casual spoken version. For example, you wouldn’t use as many contractions like “can’t” or “won’t” in writing, you will say “can not” or “will not”. You’d use “child” instead of “kid”, and “policemen” instead of “cop”.

Language is saturated with rules. There are rules that we never think about that just unconsciously guide the way we put words together. You put the verb before the object in English, not the object before the verb. We say “John ate the apple”, not “John the apple ate”. And you don’t even have to think about that because that’s what you soak up when you’re a child and you begin to speak. There are other rules that you only really worry about in written prose – making sure that a verb agrees with a subject that might be separated from it by many intervening words, where a casual listener would never notice. But someone who can go over a sentence a few times will certainly notice.

There are rules of style – use short words instead of long words, get rid of needless words, put sentences in the active voice instead of the passive if you’re focusing on the agent of the action. But there are also rules that serve as initiation rights. You have got to learn them in order to prove that you’ve attended the right schools or you’ve learned from the right teachers, almost like fraternity hazing rights, that if you undergo them, it proves that your worthy of joining a club. Rules like not ending a sentence with a preposition, rules like not splitting an infinitive, not saying “to boldly go where no man has gone before” but “to go boldly where no man has gone before”. “To go boldly” instead of “to boldly go” really doesn’t fit with the logic of English; it really comes from a bad analogy with Latin. In Latin you can’t split an infinitive because it’s one word, there isn’t a separate word ‘to’ that’s stuck onto a verb, and centuries ago someone had the idea that if you can’t do it in Latin, then you shouldn’t be able to do it in English. But of course English is a very different language than Latin, and that rule makes no sense no matter how you look at it, and indeed some of the greatest writers in English routinely flout that rule . Just because it’s in rulebook, doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be followed. Language changes over time. We don’t sound like Shakespeare, who didn’t sound like Chaucer. It wasn’t because every generation since then has been introducing errors and making the language worse and worse, but its because languages spontaneously change and rules should keep up. For example, the rule that says that you should never use “hopefully” to refer to your attitude towards a sentence, that you should only say “hopefully, Larry Bird hurled the ball at the basket” but never “hopefully, the Celtics will win”. It may have made sense a hundred years ago, but it’s just not the way people talk anymore, and there’s nothing wrong with using “hopefully” in the way that everyone uses it. It makes sense for an editor or a teacher who’s conveying rules or enforcing them to scrutinize them; to ask is this rule really doing something useful, is it making someone’s prose crisper or clearer, or more understandable, or is it just something that I’m insisting on because my English teacher insisted on it because her English teacher insisted on it, and there’s no longer any reason for the rule if there ever was one.

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POETRY AND PROSE

Many people wonder what came first prose, or poetry, and there’s certainly a romantic part of ourselves that would like to believe poetry came first, but I suspect prose did. Poetry is special because we recognize that it is a very special kind of speech. It tends to be used in special occasions, for a particular purpose of arousing an emotional reaction in people. You can recognize poetry in languages you don’t speak, in remote cultures, because it tends to have three second lines, followed by paused. You can even recognize poetry in American Sign Language. Poetry is special and it suggests that it builds on top of abilities that we use much more as we say prosaically, namely for prose. The earliest writing systems seemed to involve very mundane matters, like which farmer stored how much grain of what kind in the granary. It seems that writing started off as a kind of record keeping for agricultural surpluses before it was expanded to all of the various messages that we enjoy today.

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FICTION

Why do we like fiction so much? After all, stories are a pack of lies. There really wasn’t a guy named Henry Higgins or someone named Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. But we can’t get enough of the stuff. We tell each other stories, we write them down, we read them, and we see them played out in front of our eyes on stage and on a silver screen.

One possibility is that it’s just a way of giving ourselves pleasure by tickling the parts of the brain that respond to gossip. It happens to be gossip about people that don’t exist, but for the same reason that we’re curious about the foibles of people around us, we might enjoy watching the foibles of people who look as if they’re real or are described as if they’re real, but happen not to be real.

There may also be an advantage to composing and hearing stories, namely playing out hypothetical scenarios so as to be able to anticipate how to behave or what would happen in real life. There are lots of ways in which people can interact, like fall in love with someone that belongs to another clan, maybe have a brother or sister who you suspect is about to betray you, like wanting to grab power but other people are in your way. There are just an infinite number of ways in which people can interact with one another, and no one is smart enough to figure out how they would all play out in real life. When you see a play or listen to a story, someone else has done the work of playing out an interaction among humans. In the audience you can see how it plays out, imagine what you would do in that circumstance, see what would plausibly happen, and file it away in memory as a way of keeping in mind how one might behave that way in real life.

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GOOD WRITING

What makes for good writing? There isn’t one answer to that question, because people write for different purposes. People write to arouse emotions in their listeners, they write to get complex ideas across, they write to create a sense of solidarity with their readers. What allows them to accomplish those tasks is going to vary depending on what the task is. But for the most common kind of writing, expository writing, news, science writing, reporting histories and so on. The important ingredients are recognizing where an audience is coming from, that is not explaining so much that the audience gets bored, but not assuming so much that the audience doesn’t know what your talking about. There’s no way in any kind of language that you could spell out every detail that is present in a situation. If you do that, you get a legal document, you get legalese, ordinarily conversation is more cooperative, you add to what the speaker already knows. In writing you don’t have the person in front of you nodding, or shaking his head; you don’t know that person personally. You’ve got to make a very good guess as to what they do know and what they don’t know in order to provide just the right amount of information.

Good writing also has to respect the reader’s short-term memory. Long unwieldy sentences, even long words can tax the reader’s memory so that by the time that they get to the end of the sentence they cant remember what was at the beginning. Good writing should be concrete, people, especially people like me, academics have a strong temptation to try to flaunt our knowledge and our highfalutin’ vocabulary. But that actually makes language much more difficult to understand. Just to give an example, earlier in my career, I was collaborating with another academic who was describing an experiment by saying that subjects were tested under good to excellent conditions of acoustic isolation, and I crossed it out and I put, “subjects were tested in a quiet room”. Now what he meant by good to excellent conditions of isolation was a quiet room so why not say “a quiet room”. The human mind always tries to conjure up a concrete situation that corresponds to the meaning of a sentence, and if you provide that concrete situation for the reader, you are sparing him from a lot of work.

Good writing never strays too far from speech. It avoids the temptation to use the luxury of a printed page to compose long run-on sentences, or to use fancy shmancy vocabulary to prove how knowledgeable you are. Good writing tracks speech in order to take advantage of the natural way in which the human brain can process speech.

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REWRITING

One of the great advantages of language in its written form is that you can revise it. When you speak, the words come out of your mouth and they are gone forever, whereas when you write, you can take a second or a third or a fourth look at your words. You can look at the beginning of a sentence and then at the end and back to the beginning to make sure that all the parts hang together. You can pronounce it to yourself in a rapid or a slow manner, and make sure that the sentence has the right rhythm. In speech, the events take place too quickly for you to craft the words in the optimal manner, and once they’re out of your mouth, they’re gone forever.

When I write a book, I’ll put it through six, seven, eight drafts, and I won’t really enjoy it until I’m revising, simply because it’s so much effort to get a coherent argument down in some kind of logical, sequential order that to make the prose sing, to make it fun to read is too much to try to accomplish in one fell swoop. Once the basic ideas are there, then I can go over it again, I can omit the needless words, I can tighten up the prose, I can make it funny and melodic; too much to hope for while I’m trying to get across some abstruse argument the very first time.

Many writers find that they have to put aside a draft, and come back to it several months later in order to edit it properly. That’s because when something comes right out of the word processor, you’re attached to it. You’ve put a lot of work and sweat and anguish into it, and you like it too much. When you set it aside, it appears to you as if someone else has written it, and you can be much more ruthless about getting rid of the bad bits, or re-writing things that weren’t clear, or that strive too hard, or that are clunky for one reason or another.

Writers and editors differ partly because editors will typically work on someone else’s prose, so they have no investment in it, they don’t get insulted if a bit needs to be taken out, or if something needs to be rewritten. They don’t care how much work went into it and they don’t feel they have to recover all of that investment. Editors also can place themselves in the position of a reader who doesn’t know what the writer knows, and therefore can inform the writer as to what to expect from the people who will actually be consuming their prose.