Notes on Writing

The development of writing transformed speech utterly and forever: it turned sound into sight. What had heretofore been spoken and heard could now be seen as well. The oral was made visible. This transformation of sounds into marks on a page, of vocal range into visual field, has staggering implications for writers and readers alike. Symbols stand in for sounds; the eye stands in for the ear. To put it another way, the eye becomes the gateway to the ear.

Language alone was not enough to fuel the dramatic rise of civilizations all around the globe. The real advances in culture came with the invention of a permanent from of speech--writing.

The story of writing is one of rapid technologicial improvement, going from a slow, insufficient tool of a few to a fast, efficient medium for the masses. However, the real impact that writing had on civilization was that it became a new form of genetic material to capture the advances of human culture. Just as spoken language had earlier helped man to pin down each generation's advances in food gathering, tool-making, and social living, so writing became the genes for capturing the rapid strides being made by civilization. It provided a permanent way of recording the details that underpined complex societies and that were too numerous or boring for the human mind to remember easily--such as taxation records and business deals.

The invention and spread of movable type is probably the most important mechanical contributor to the idea of the unique self, but other forces--religious and political revolutions, the rediscovery and admiration for classical models of being--retarded the assertion of the self.

Writing is a form of management behavior. The way you manage people is reflected in the way you manage words; the way you manage words is a reflection of the way you manage people.

Along with an increase in verbal clarity comes an increase in managerial authority. The manager conveys more than instruction; s/he conveys a sense of self--a self who is organized and clear, and who expects staff to be organized and clear too.

Identifying the right question is central to the entire writing process, yet it is no easy thing. It involves creating and sustaining a dialogue with the reader--on the right subject, at the right level of abstraction, with the right amount of supporting detail.

In corporate life, writing is negotiating the movement of ideas through an organization. In order to do so successfully, you need to decide how much leverage to exert. The risks are real, but they should always be weighted against a fully developed thought process; they should never be allowed to short circuit it. In other words, it pays to know what you want to say before you decide whether to say it.

Meaning visits the document with each reader and each reading. When all is said and read, it's the reader, not the writer, who ultimately judges the document's meaning and utility.

The digital and hypertextual forces supposedly leading to the death of reading are in fact going to lead to its golden age. Right now, we call it reading any time characters come before our eyes, whether we're "reading" a novel, a menu, a set of assembly instructions, or an exit sign. The term has come to cover too wide a territory. But reading is about to be niched.

The first books moving online are reference manuals. We want random and instant access to the information we need. And so, increasingly, online reference works are being disigned as software applications rather than as online books.

Pretty soon we won't call using online reference works reading. Instead, we'll just call it referencing. This will leave the term reading to describe engaging printed matter where sequence does count, where the order of the presentation is an important part of its value--novels, essays, poems. Reading will become a time of continuity in a fragmented world.

All media routinely declare they are independent of their advertisers. One reason they have to keep saying it is everybody knows they're lying. The other reason is to shame the advertisers as much as possible and back them off.

The United States has a trifurcated communications system: In the domains of print, common carriage, and broadcasting, the law has evolved separately.

1) In the domain of print and other means of communication that existed in the formative days of the nation, such as pulpits, periodicals, and public meetings, the First Amendment truly governs. The American Revolution was in the hands of the printers (hence freedom of the "press"), with Tom Paine's pamphlet "Common Sense" selling 120,000 copies in three months.

2) In the domain of the common carrier, which includes the telephone, the telegraph, the postal system, and now some computer networks, a different set of policies has been applied, designed above all to ensure universal service and fair access by the public to the facilities of the carrier: it is obligated to serve all on equal terms without discrimination.

3) In the domain of broadcasting, Congress and the courts have established a highly regulated regime, very different from that of print. On the grounds of a supposed scarcity of usable frequencies in the radio spectrum, broadcasters are selected by the government for merit in its eyes, assigned a slice each of the spectrum of frequencies, and required to use that assignment fairly and for community welfare as defined by state authorities. In short, for broadcasting, a politically managed system has been invented.

Ours is a society pervaded by the anonymous discourse of the announcer's voice. And the degree to which the media have taken over the socialization of the young from working mothers and commuting fathers is astounding.