On Being "Chirographically Thinking and Speaking Human Beings:" A Response to Walter J. Ong

Writing is not an innately human activity.
A spoken truth is fleating, temporary.
Lanugage technology pushes us farther away from human nature.
So great!
True & Fascinating!
Yes!
Mechanical contrivances allow for human expression.
Writing divides, identifies & isolates.
No?
Language trumps music!  More deeply internalized form of human expression.

These are just a few of the lively comments that are scrawled on the pages of my copy of Walter J. Ong's paper, "Writing is a Technology That Restructures Thought." I could not stop with the marginalia in this one.  His work uncovers a wealth of jewel-like insights into the the role language (written and oral) plays in the cognitive, psychological and social development of humans.  When he writes, "If [modern literate humans] are asked to think of the word 'nevertheless' for two minutes, 120 seconds, without ever allowing any letters at all to enter their imaginations, they cannot comply. A person from a completely oral background of course has no such problem," Ong skillfully reveals to his readers what it would be like without their foundation in graphic language.  His imagery quickly conveys the sense of a mental white board, an interior space where all the letters and words dance to the surface when summoned-up with a verbal or conceptual cue. Without the development or mastery of the written word, our minds would function in a very different way. I cannot help but wonder what that white screen would contain in an oral society. Pictures? Colors?  How would we choose our words without the concept of how they are visually represented?  Would emphasis be placed more on sound or precise meaning?  Or, would we utilize different forms of artful expression altogether, demoting verbalization to an inferior mode of communication? Through Ong's simple example it becomes strikingly clear that we modern humans are constantly engaging visually with the alphabetic representation of our language and that the oral & visual cannot exist seperately in our modern literate minds.  This point of interconnectedness is just one of the many fascinating kernals of thought Ong presents in this work; and upon further reading, marking-up the pages, I became keenly aware that his astoundingly well written ideas are not only foundational to linguistic theory but extremely relevant to the conversations we are having in class on literacy and language acquisition.