Ong's Paper

I think that Ong's overall message is that writing and literacy is not normal and should not be considered as a mechanical skill that we learn, such as how someone learns to tie a shoe. It is very complex and honestly unnatural. Writing is a system created by man, not by nature, that has become so intwined in our lives that we cannot separate ourselves from it. He says, "The fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort we cannot separate it from ourselves" (24). He goes on to talk about how many cultures that have developed on Earth, only a small portion of them actually had a written language. In fact, even today out of the 4,000 languages spoken, only 78 have a literature (26). He believes that by having a written language, the people change the way they think. They move from a purely oral society to a literate one. Our concept of words changes. Ong describes how a person recalls words, for example 'nevertheless'. He says that "recalling sounded words is like recalling a bar of music, a melody, a sequence in time. A word is an event, a happening, not a thing, as letters make it appear" (25). Literacy is not a normal and simple thing that is natural for a person to learn.