Writing as Technology
Writing has transformed human consciousness more than any other single invention. The literate mind does not simply use writing as a tool; its very thought processes are structured by the technology of writing, even when composing orally. This claim sounds strange because we do not normally think of writing as technology at all. Technologies are things like computers and automobiles—external devices. But writing is equally artificial: there is no natural way to write as there is to speak.
Ong drew a striking parallel between historical objections to writing and contemporary anxieties about computers. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates objects that writing is inhuman (establishing outside the mind what belongs inside), destroys memory (providing external crutches for internal resources), is unresponsive (returning the same words regardless of questions), and cannot defend itself (existing outside real give-and-take). These are precisely the objections raised against computers and, earlier, against print.
Yet criticising these technologies requires using them. Plato's critique of writing is itself written, and his analytical philosophy was made possible by the cognitive changes writing brought about. His very concept of abstract "Ideas" or "Forms"—voiceless, immobile, unchanging—represents the rejection of oral culture's warm, interactive lifeworld in favour of the visual, spatial bias of writing. Plato could not have formulated his objections to writing clearly without the cognitive transformations that writing had already produced.
Technologies properly interiorised do not degrade human life but enhance it. A violin is a tool, an orchestra the product of high technology, yet through them musicians express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without mechanical contrivance. Writing is such a technology.
Autonomous Discourse
Writing creates what scholars call "context-free" or "autonomous" discourse—utterances detached from their authors and from the existential situations in which speech naturally occurs. Unlike oral speech, which can be challenged and made to defend itself, a written text cannot be directly questioned. After total refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is why books have been burned and why "the book says" is popularly tantamount to "it is true." Texts are inherently contumacious.
Writing carries a paradoxical association with death. Plato called it inhuman; Horace referred to his Odes as a "monument" presaging his own death. Yet this deadness enables resurrection into limitless living contexts by potentially infinite readers.
The condition of words in texts differs radically from speech. Written words are isolated from the fuller context of face-to-face communication; they lack intonation; both writer and reader must fictionalise each other. Writing is solipsistic—the author must be isolated to write for thousands. Early literature helped readers situate themselves through dialogues, frame stories, or other devices suggesting oral settings. Later literature abandoned such aids.
To communicate without gesture, facial expression, intonation, or a real hearer, writers must foresee all possible meanings for any possible reader in any possible situation. This requirement develops new precision, feeding back into speech itself. Plato's dialogues achieve their exquisite clarity through effects of writing on thought.
The Development of Scripts
True writing—a system where a writer can determine the exact words a reader will generate from the text—was a late development. It began with Sumerian cuneiform around 3500 BC, tens of thousands of years after the emergence of Homo sapiens. The invention served primarily practical, urban, economic purposes; using writing for imaginative literature came much later.
Scripts developed through various mechanisms: pictographs (pictures representing words), ideographs (coded symbols for concepts), rebuses (pictures representing sounds), and syllabaries. Many writing systems are hybrid. But the true alphabet—where individual symbols represent individual phonemes—was invented only once, by Semitic peoples around 1500 BC. Every alphabet in the world derives from this original development.
The Semitic alphabet wrote only consonants. The Greeks added vowels, creating what Havelock argues was a crucial psychological breakthrough. The fully vocalised alphabet could write words from unknown languages, could be learned by young children with limited vocabularies, and achieved an unprecedented level of abstract analysis of sound into visual equivalents. This achievement both presaged and implemented Greek analytical thought.
The alphabet operates on sound more directly than other scripts, treating words as spatial objects that can be cut into pieces and rearranged. This falsifies the temporal, evanescent nature of speech, but the falsification proves immensely productive. A picture of a bird represents an object, not a word, and could correspond to countless words in different languages. Alphabetic writing represents the sound itself, transforming the evanescent world of sound into the quasi-permanent world of space.
Climactic Plot
Literate readers assume that climactic structure—Freytag's pyramid of ascending action, recognition, reversal, and dénouement—is the natural form of narrative. Ong argued it is nothing of the kind. Oral cultures could not produce it because climactic structure requires what oral composition cannot provide: the ability to survey a story's entirety, eliminate all but a few highlighted incidents, and arrange what remains in strict chronological order.
This explains why the epic poet "hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things." Later critics interpreted in medias res as a conscious technique—the poet knew the chronological order and chose to disrupt it for artistic effect. Milton explained that Paradise Lost "hasts into the midst of things" after "proposing in brief the whole subject"—revealing that he had from the start a control of his subject no oral poet could command.
But the oral poet had no chronological order to disrupt. Having absorbed scores of episodes about the Trojan War from other singers, Homer had a huge repertoire but absolutely no way to organise them in strict sequence. There was no list of episodes, nor in the absence of writing any possibility of conceiving such a list. Starting in medias res was not conscious design but perforce—the inevitable way to approach lengthy narrative when you cannot consult external records. If he tried to proceed chronologically, he would inevitably leave out episodes and have to insert them later.
Greek drama—composed as written text though orally performed—was the first lengthy narrative genre with tight pyramidal structure. Significantly, drama lacks a narrative voice; the author disappears beneath the characters' dialogue. Eliminating the narrator appears essential to escaping episodic structure, since the narrator naturally falls into the additive patterns of oral storytelling.
The novel extended this structure further, making the definitive break with episodic patterning. The detective story represents the apex of print-era narrative: ascending tension builds to unbearable pressure, climactic recognition releases it with explosive suddenness, and the dénouement disentangles everything totally—every detail turns out crucial and, until the climax, effectively misleading.
Round Characters
The "round" character—complex, unpredictable, interiorly motivated—emerges only through writing's interiorisation of consciousness. Homer's characters are "flat" or "heavy" types: Odysseus clusters lore about cleverness, Nestor about wisdom, Achilles about martial fury. These are not failures of characterisation but mnemonic necessities; memorable characters organise narrative and store cultural knowledge.
The first approximations of psychological complexity appear in Greek tragedy—Sophocles' Oedipus and especially Euripides' characters are incomparably more inward than Homer's. But the fully round character, "with the incalculability of life about it," emerges only in the novel. Writing and reading are solitary activities that engage the psyche in strenuous, interiorised thought unavailable to oral performance. In these private worlds, feeling for the round character is born—motivation powered mysteriously but consistently from within.
Ong noted that Freud's psychology treats real human beings as structured like dramatic characters—Oedipus read through nineteenth-century novels, made far more "round" than anything in ancient Greek literature. The very vocabulary of psychological interiority depends on deeply interiorised literacy. Insofar as modern psychology and round character represent what human existence is like, that feeling has been processed through writing and print.
Ong connected this to his earlier observation that Luria's illiterate subjects could not produce abstract self-characterisation—they described themselves through external circumstances rather than interior qualities. The interiorised self-consciousness that literate cultures take for granted is itself a literate achievement.
Grapholects and Precision
Writing creates "grapholects"—national written languages that develop far beyond their dialectal origins through centuries of normative refinement. A modern grapholect like English has been recorded so massively that it includes vocabularies of over a million words, orders of magnitude beyond any oral tongue. Dictionaries undertaking comprehensive accounts of word usage became possible only after print made multiplication of such texts feasible.
The transition from oral to literate societies was slow and contested. In eleventh and twelfth-century England, documents did not immediately inspire trust. Witnesses were considered more credible than texts because they could be challenged. Charters were often authenticated not by written signatures but by symbolic objects like knives or swords attached by thongs. Early charters were typically undated because locating oneself in abstract computed time required choosing a reference point—creation? crucifixion? birth of Christ?—that seemed either presumptuous or arbitrary. In a culture without newspapers or calendars, most people would have had no reason to know the current calendar year.
Writing makes possible lists, charts, and tables—visual arrangements of knowledge impossible in purely oral cultures. Oral cultures situate equivalent information in narrative: the Iliad's catalogue of ships embeds geographic and political data in a story about war; biblical itineraries present geography as formulaic action narrative ("Setting out from X, they camped at Y"). The alphabet itself bridges oral and literate mnemonics: its sequence is memorised orally but used for visual retrieval in indexes.