RolePlayGateway™

Since this is a board for writing (and for your growth in writing), I've decided to write out a few topics for you all (which I will call "Lessons" for lack of a better name) covering numerous general issues in the writing field. Use these for your own benefit, and remember that all of the information I give here will only lead to positive growth as a writer, through knowing the background of the field or fine-tuning your technique.

Lesson One: Orality vs. Literacy

It is important to remember that writing is not simply a representation of speech, and that the two have very different structures.

Oral cultures retained everything in their society through shared memory, nothing was written down. As a result, primary orality (speech before writing) was formulaic, prefabricated and filled with techniques such as repetition, patterns and epithets to aid memory.

When writing was invented (and it was invented), it greatly restructured human consciousness. As an interiorized technology, it expanded our capacity with no outward tool for its synthesis. Since oral cultures had to hold a great deal in their memories, they had very little capacity to think beyond those set formulas and what was already known to them. What writing made possible was the storage of that information, and the ability to go through it again and form new conclusions and reach new thoughts that were previously inaccesible.

In addition, writing led people to think in terms of causality. By having the series of events or thoughts visually in front of them, they could see what had led to what, and combining this knowledge which their newly freed mentally capacity, could rationalize on a more intricate level where their thoughts were going.

As a result, we now have a new orality, secondary orality, a type of speech affected greatly by writing in its form and complexity. If there are any doubts in your mind that this change has taken place, try to think of the word "and" as a concept and not as the series of letters that represent it. You can not.

An area where the difference between orality and literacy is extremely evident is the law. Before writing, like everything else law, or custom, was stored in shared memory. It was moldable and applicable to any situation because of its immediacy (it was generated on the spot by those in a position to do so). In this it was more modern and relevant because of this accessibility. When writing came about and created writtern law, it created both a system that was more vague (since it had to respond to possibly unanticipated circumstances) and a system that needed interpretation. Law was fossilized through writing and in many cases out of date.

As you can see, with all of the benefits writing has brought us, there were sacrifices made along the way. Still, literacy should be widely accepted as a blessing and not a curse to society.

Important terms: primary orality, secondary orality, custom, law

If there are any questions, please post them below.

Wow, that article was pretty damn interesting. I never really thought about it like that: the cultural shift from 'making shit up on the spot' to 'writing shit down for future reference'.

Although the problem is that your article meandered off a bit around the mid point. Your intention -- judging by the title and opening segment -- was to differentiate between the structure of oral speech, and the structure of writing. Instead you just talked about the anthropological history of writing as a new way of processing information. Which is interesting to me, because I'm studying psychology and anthropology and enjoy them both. But as a writer, the structural differences would be a lot more helpful to know.

You do seem to know what you're talking about though, which is refreshing. I subscribe to a couple writing magazines, and half the contributors seem to hastily pull it out of their asses every month.

Couldn't you describe and as a link between two ideas or things? Now a harder thing to describe is the taste of salt to somone who has never tasted it lol.

Awesome perspective - I've never really paid that much attention to the history of speech and writing... But I agree with the first commenter. It seems kind of unfinished.

I'd appriciate it if you went a little bit more into the differences between the structure of modern speech and writing, because a lot of RPers I knoww (and I myself tend to do it) tend to write like they talk... and it doesn't get much depth, there's no diction, etc.

Note that this article was written three years ago, guys. I'm going to take this down from being a sticky.