Calculating our moves with Text: Writing is like Math
According to Walter J. Ong, writing is the most drastic of technologies to have ever been introduced. “It initiated what print and computers only continue, the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist.”(Ong, p. 80) According to Ong, Plato was alarmed by writing and feared that it would deteriorate memory (p.78). But how can it, when taking the time to write “heightens consciousness” and allows us to realize our inner potentials. Ultimately, to create, we need to observe and reflect, prior to assembling our words into text.
In order to create a written work though, the writer must go through a creative process that involves organizing their thoughts. Sometimes this may be subconscious and our mind organizes as the ideas come forward, but for most, serious planning has to happen prior to writing. With the development of the World Wide Web, we now have writing spattered across this interface and it is organized into hypertext. According to Wesch, information (text) is always changing, but we feel a need to organize it, regardless of what format it comes to us in, even online!
“We tend to conceive hypertext spatially: the link constitute a path through a virtual space and the reader becomes a visitor or traveler in that space” (Bolter, ch 3) This is true of all texts; readers are always travelling through them and the writing directs the ship, but what each person may discover is open to their personal interpretation. That is the beauty of the written word, it recounts a truth or a discovery, but how each reader views it or absorbs it, remains personal. This means that the writer is in charge of organizing the written words in a specific manner in order to have the greatest effect on the reader.
The other day I met a retired Chinese Pharmacist who lives near me in Vancouver and we began talking. Peter recounted his story of coming to Canada at 16 and being placed in English classes. His dream was to get into UBC and become a Pharmacist, but his English needed much improvement before that was to be possible. He began to study the language and realized that it all came down to structure. If he could find the best sentences and collect his data, he could formulate great essays following his structure guidelines. “Essentially,” he said, “it’s Math.” As writers, our goal is always to assemble our words for the greatest impact or the reaction we are seeking.
With hypertext, “the writer is thinking and writing in terms of verbal units or topics. Whose meaning transcends their constituent words.” This is true also of all forms of writing. How we organize our topics or information, whether it be data or online. Just like Peter, the writer is a programmer or a mathematician, outlining the structural skeleton of the text, prior to assembling it into a website, a program, a story, or an essay!
This brings me back to teaching my Language Arts 8 classes and how important it is to plan and reflect on the impact we hope our writing has. Have we organized our work in order to reach the reader(s)? The same goes for website building, and anything involving text! Literacy courses need to be evolving, just as our use of text continues to evolve down very different, yet similar, avenues!
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2000). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
Wesch, M. Information R/evolution (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM
Hi Sarah,
I agree with your comment about the importance of literacy courses evolving so as to keep up with changes to text. If we consider what Ong said about writing being the most dramatic of technologies ever created, then things are really not changing at a break-neck speed! But it seems that practically every day in our high-paced society there is a new technology being introduced that requires us to change our approach to teaching, if even in the slightest of ways. The amount of technology that has changed even since I began teaching 15 years ago is amazing and scary at the same time. But as teachers, we must stay on top things and ensure that we can provide students with the best education possible at this time. We cannot continue to teach in the same way that teachers 50 years ago, or even for that matter, 5 years ago, did. The video “Information R/evolution” had one place in particular that made me think about this. It said, speaking of the ability on the web to change our writing and thinking, that “we can rethink information” (Wesch, 2007). Then the word “can” changes to “must.” We must rethink information. Today’s students are required to be much more critical learners than were students of past generations. In math they are expected to solve problems at higher levels of thinking and to explain their thinking. In reading and writing, they are required to analyze their own thoughts and the thoughts of others. With the web and its hyper-texting abilities, this is far from an easy task! If we want students to stay on top of this, we as teachers, and the courses we teach, must evolve as well.
Jennifer
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
Wesch, M. Information R/evolution (video). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM
Hello Sarah,
If Plato could only sit down and have a chat with Walter Ong. I wonder what would be on the table? Southern Comfort or red wine? Although true that Plato wrote that literacy will destroy memory, he could not have predicted that in the 21st century, educators are putting more emphasis on synthesis, understanding, the ability to interlink concepts and less emphasis on rote memorization. There was once a time when orality and rhetoric (Chandler’s essays) was a higher scholarship than literacy which was seen as a secondary support for orality. Now I think its pretty obvious that literacy is considered a higher degree than orality. People are measured by how “well read” they are. Higher education is synonymous with reading and writing. Ong’s response to Platos comment on literacy may have been that literacy recycles those words back into orality (Ong, 117).
Jennifer, you had mentioned that our students need to be critical thinkers. I think that may be only partly driven by teachers, but more driven by society in general. What I mean by that is over the last couple of centuries, as we exit the mechanical / industrial revolution, as North America grew rich, we priced ourselves out of our own manufacturing market. As manufacturing leaves our shores, we turn to invention, innovation, business, science and technology as our sustenance. This new landscape demands a different type of citizen, not one that can flourish with only the ability for rote memorization and recall.
Hi Jennifer and Daniel!
It should would be funny to see Plato and Ong debating over coffee! I wonder what they would spend the most time talking about?!
You both raise such interesting points. It’s true that it feels like our courses have to evolve quickly, and yet in the grand scheme, the changes are miniscule in comparison to how text has evolved since its origin.
We do require much more reflection in our courses today and I constantly get eye-rolls, even from adults, when we talk about the pains of reflecting and analyzing our thoughts. It is hard work, and yet, when taught to do it early, perhaps easier? Hopefully! I guess I wonder how we make reflection a more meaningful task that is appreciated – does that come with age or rest!
Very true Daniel! I do not think that any of the changes that are occurring can be considered as an entity on their own. I think that everything is very unconnected and changes to one area cause changes to another. For children today, critical thinking is a skill that will need to be taught early on in order to keep up with these societal changes.
Hi Daniel;
Your comments on the move away from industrialization makes me think that older generations were taught skill sets to use their hands, to rely on repetitive tasks to earn a living. Today’s generations must learn a skill set that uses their mind so they can adapt to economical changes in society. at one time it was thought a person would work for one company for their lifetime. Then it was a person would change jobs 3, then 7 times in their career. Those days maybe gone. Young people will require an advanced intellect to survive the flux of any future economy in their lifetime. It is sad to see young people out now looking for employment in this time of transition.
“Calculating our moves with text: wringing is like math”
Sarah Irwin-Gibson
Great post Sarah! I like the stance that you have taken outlining the mathematical process in writing. Creating a well-composed piece of writing is most definitely a calculated process. Working with students in order to reflect, compile, organize then write is a process that we spend much time examining in order to develop essay-writing skill and prepare students for secondary school.
Writing can be looked at as a mathematical and a creative process. Plato was not wrong in saying “writing destroys memory,” however what writing does is it pushes individuals to a deeper level of understanding and ability to reflect and share knowledge (Ong, 2002, p. 78). Moreover, Plato doesn’t (or rather, Ong (2002) does not) address the drastic effect to the creative process as a result of writing changing our thought processing. With the incorporating of text there is the opportunity for more reflection and critical thinking. On the other hand, the attention to the details in sentence structure and well-composed texts can result in the limitation of creative process due to “the desire to legislate for ‘correctness’ in language” (Ong, 2003, p. 127).
Children and young students have a keen sense of wonder and creativity. Growing up, we lose touch with these elements and begin to fixate on achievement and realistic blocks to get to our future. Due to time constraints, we ignore those whimsical thoughts that we had as children and dedicate our time and energy into productive and constructive tasks. Fostering both wonder and creativity as the content (not necessarily the curriculum guidelines) and simply supporting them by structure and text will help to shift students understanding and hopefully have students more engaged in their learning. Like what Jennifer and Daniel mention above, in order to be successful in writing and this technological age, we must rethink information in order to create a new kind of citizen that can compete and be active participants in our society (The New London Group, 1996, p. 60). We must think of how to keep students engaged in the creative and production process with maintaining the fundamental elements of composition.
References:
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92.
Ong, W. J. (2002). Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.
Thanks for your post! The Chinese Pharmacist’s analogy of English and Math is quite interesting and remarkable. As a highly complex skill set, a language is not only the vehicle of thought but also an instrument of higher order thinking. There is a close connection between the way of thinking and the way of expressing thought, whether it’s written or spoken. It also involves a lot of processes including biological, cognitive, and social skills. Math and English are similar in that they both follow a certain rules or structures and human cognition must first attribute meaning to the elements to build a learning pattern. On the other hand, they are dissimilar in that ideas can be expressed in vastly different ways whereas there’s only one solution to every math problem. Precisely, “as writers, our goal is always to assemble our words for the greatest impact or the reaction we are seeking.” Relating what you pointed out to Org, “The writer’s audience is always fiction,” I believe it requires a creative process that involves organizing their thoughts and imaginations because the writers can only anticipate what would be the impact or the response of the readers. At the same time, the writer has to base his or her anticipation on personal experience of human communication, which according to Org is never one way. Writing can take on different forms and have the power to influence. To create, it involves deeper understanding about human psychology and consciousness. That’s why we need to constantly observe and reflect!
Cheers,
Christy
Reference:
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
I completely agree with you Christy! You and Laura sum it up well that the creative process involves organizing our thoughts and imagination into something!
Thank you for sharing!
What an interesting way to view the written language. I have always struggled in English and had I thought of writing as a mathematical concept, I may have been able to relate to it by searching for my own structural guidelines like the pharmacist. If I extend the mathematical analogy even further, I have come to realize that hypertexts are very similar to the buttons on a calculator. Of course hypertexts have more functionality than a calculator but the basic purposes of hypertext can be mirrored by the buttons on a calculator. For example, the hypertexts that serves as a footnote for a site are like the memory buttons in a calculator. The hypertexts that define relationships between pages are like the operation buttons (plus, minus, divide, multiply) in a calculator and the hypertexts that associate the page with external sources are like the complicated function buttons (trigonometric, logarithmic, exponential, probability, statistics, etc.). Unlike a calculator which is standardized, hypertexts must define their own system and readers must decipher these systems, which is where the comparison deteriorates. As a result, it can get confusing for individuals if elements shrouded in a new vocabulary of signs found in words, graphics or icons become too abstract or disconnected. But nonetheless, it is interesting to use mathematical constructs to describe print.
Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen
Good observation Sarah;
According to Ong and others, Plato, like most of us, may have hesitated to fully accept writing for all its advantages to living because human nature seems to expect a down side and are not often disappointed. What Plato understood memory and writing to be then most likely is not what we who have had more and varied experiences with both would describe them today. We know that “…when taking the time to write “heightens consciousness” allow[ing] us to realize our inner potentials” and that what is written can sustain a longer life than the audio voice. Today’s technology requires us to heighten our consciousness even more so. Plato could not imagine his words would have such a along life. Today’s young people may not realize this either.
Oh, yes we are organizers. We need order in our lives, it provides clarity, stability, calm and restfulness. Without order, we are left in a cloud of confusion with no sense of direction as to how to move forward.
…”what each person may discover is open to their personal interpretation. That is the beauty of the written word, it recounts a truth or a discovery, but how each reader views it or absorbs it, remains personal. This means that the writer is in charge of organizing the written words in a specific manner in order to have the greatest effect on the reader.” This brings us back to the role of the written word – connectivity. Personal interpretation can take on many forms and also evolves with time both for the readers and the original writer. The written word allows us to revisit, reevaluate our interpretations.
But the writer is only in charge until his thoughts are written. Once made physical he must set them free. He can only hope that his choice of wording will be understood in a similar context as his own.
Your Pharmacist friend had the right idea. There is a mathematical formula to the English language. We who have spoken English since birth may not realize this fact. Words and numbers have gone hand in hand since at least the time of the Sumerians. Not all words fit into the writing formuli in the same ways; the puzzle can be complicated. His personality needed to find an order, a system to learning a new language that worked for him.
Terry