Blog 3

While reading both the pieces for this week it really got me thinking about how writing, sounds and language are all connected. It never occurred to me that my language and how I express myself was an invention. That a language and how people communicate with each other is not natural, but a highly thought out complicated system that has evolved with time. “writing has transformed human consciousness.” (Ong). I agree fully with this statement writing has transformed how humans think and perceive the world around them. For example I found if very interesting when Ong spoke about oral storytelling verse writing stories down for documentation. It made me think about how I relate to the word literature. When I say this word, literature, I hardly ever if not at all, think about oral storytelling but written literature. However these two forms of communication are so closely related to each other that it reminds me of the old question, “What came first the chicken or the egg?” It seems to be a paradox in some cases. Not only how communication came about weather something originated as written literature to oral but how it incorporated so many of our senses and abilities. Seeing, hearing and vocalizing ideas to communicate to one another what is going on inside our minds. As Ong discusses people need other outlets of language to fully grasp concepts. That we need more than sound but visual representation of words as well. This I find to be very true relating back to my life. It has been a long and slow process of trying to master a different language. I can’t imagine trying to learn, in my case Spanish, without having visual representation to help me along the way. Again as Ong said before “writing has transformed human consciousness.” Relating this back to me, it has made how I consciously view the world. How I think and learn when trying to communicate in a language that I was born into or to a language I am trying to master. The invention of writing and the creation of an alphabet is an extraordinary invention. It allowed the human populations communicate with one another and archive while we do so.