For many people across the world today the written word is an integral part of daily life, used to maintain relationships between family and friends, to access services or to conduct business in a work setting. It is so common that it can easily escape our notice. In urban environments, in particular, we are surrounded by written text. Writing is ubiquitous, and it is also more mobile now than at any point during the past. Apart from the occasional obstacle, we expect to be able to connect with others by smartphone wherever we are. Our writing devices travel with us, words and messages combine with sound, with still and moving images on the screens of our handheld devices, and we can keep multiple threads of written conversations going. This is one way that writing allows us to reach out from our immediate location. And because the written word remains visible, we are also able to communicate across time. It’s not an exaggeration, then, to say that writing enables us to escape from the limitations of time and space – perhaps that fact alone seems enough to underline the significance of writing. But all this is by no means new. In all probability, writing was first invented somewhere between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago and some of its basic functions were surprisingly quick to develop.¹

In order to understand the unique role that it plays in our contemporary lives, I want to identify what is distinctive about written communication, how it conveys information and helps us to make meaning. Writing is one form of human communication, and I want to show the ways in which it is woven into the fabric of everyday life and how it combines with other systems of representation and communication. This chapter is principally concerned with locating and defining writing in the context of communication in general, and in the more specific domain of human communication. I will be emphasizing the linguistic basis of writing systems, examining their underlying characteristics, how their invention works as a representational resource and how they are intimately connected with social, material and cultural conditions. In order to achieve some clarity about writing, the power of writing and why writing still matters, we need to be clear about some basic concepts, to establish some terms of reference and to find a language for talking about writing. Writing is many things, as we shall see, but in this chapter, I show that, in essence, it is a system of visual communication that uses symbols that have a particular relationship to the world.

1.1 Communication

At a café, in Cardigan, I watch a young man putting up specials on a chalkboard. His neat hand leaves a trail of white letters in a language I can read – English that is, not Welsh. The chalkboard is on a wall that everyone can see, opposite the entrance to the café, a highly visible prompt for what’s on offer. It relieves the staff of the burden of remembering all the detail and is a handy go-between when you order (does that come with chips?). The specials board takes its place in a chain of events involving multiple interactions between people and things, between cooks and knives, and various ingredients warmed or grilled. A chain of events that results in the appearance of a plate of food and culminates at the point of payment. These events all make sense because they are part of the familiar cultural pattern of being a customer in a privately owned space that provides a service in exchange for payment. In their particular form and detail they constitute a social practice involving, amongst other things, interactions between people and texts, arrangements of furniture – counters, chairs and tables, the movement of things like trays, mugs and dirty dishes, food preparation, cooking, plating-up and table service. And within these routines, writing has an important instrumental role to play – it participates in, and to some extent, it shapes what happens. I use this example to draw attention to the way in which writing is embedded. It plays a recognizable role in events as they unfold. But there is a point, if we can isolate it, at which the specials board is being written, just as there is a point, or points, at which the specials board is read. This is the point – or perhaps one of several points – at which written communication comes to the fore. It will help, for the moment, if we pause and focus our attention on the moment of communication. It will help in our understanding of writing, even if we must eventually ‘press play’ and see it as part of a more complex interweaving of actions, interactions, transactions and affects.²

Communication, in the most fundamental sense, involves the movement of meaningful information – in the café, that’s information about the food on offer. And communication requires two or more parties: one to send a message and another to receive or interpret that message. This basic model underlines how communication works to establish a relationship or interaction, and as a basic definition it works; but in practice, of course, things are far more complex. For a start, communication describes a very broad range of relationships and interactions – interactions between parts of an organism, bits of a system or members of a species or entity. There are broader applications of this word ‘communication’, too. Communication can form a bridge between different organisms or systems. As any pet owner will tell you, there is no shortage of cross-species communication out there, and it doesn’t all involve humans! Communication also stretches well beyond the animal kingdom. Take recent developments in mycology as an example. Here scientists have highlighted the complexity of information exchange between fungi – and they’ve also shown how that information is taken up and used by other organisms such as forest trees, for example, in responding to the challenges of disease or environmental change.³ Even trees communicate with one another. The myriad of forms of communication that surround us all involve different processes of encoding and decoding information, and the majority of these are naturally occurring. However you think about it, communication is ubiquitous, and it is by no means exclusively human.

Humans, though, are social animals, heavily dependent on collaboration and communication, and their capacity for invention and innovation has often focused on new ways of storing and sharing information. This innovative drive lies behind the invention and development of writing. This is a development that has continued across the centuries from early agricultural societies well into the digital age. Digital technologies may seem to have changed our lives in a way that breaks with the past, but they might just as well be seen as the most recent expression of our urge to communicate with one another (Figure 1.1). A vast infrastructure that links the silicon chips in smartphones to satellites and server farms helps to hold our everyday digital communication in place. We are clearly talking about a complex and sophisticated system. But written communication, whether it appears on paper, in print or on screen is a fundamentally human invention. It doesn’t occur spontaneously, nor does it gradually emerge in infancy, as speech does. It has to be learnt.

Figure 1.1 Technological development extends communication.

(featuring Tom Price’s sculpture Network at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park)⁴

Technological development extends communication in ever newer directions. Push notifications on our smartphones remind us to do things; they attempt to capture our attention and alert us to incoming information, whereas virtual agents like Alexa and Siri listen to us and talk to us – yes, we communicate with machines, too! Behind all of this lies the whole architecture of the Internet which, for all its complexity, is based on machines communicating with each other. The Internet of things that furnishes the smart home with its Ring doorbells, remote heating systems and phone-activated lighting works to extend our communicative reach. As we are all now aware, new developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence take all this to another level. Whereas technologies have always participated in written communication, there are now situations in which we can’t be entirely sure whether we are communicating with another person or a machine.

Whatever your perspective, communication has to be seen as more than human.⁵ It is important to acknowledge this before narrowing the focus down onto human communication and indeed on to one specific, but crucially important, aspect of our communicative repertoire – writing. And just as communication is a much larger category than human–human interaction, so human communication is a much larger topic than writing itself. Their interrelationship is like a set of Russian dolls, sharing important similarities but distinctive and separate forms. Our analytical task here is to focus on one particular aspect of human communication – writing, but as we do this, it is important to realize how it exists in relation to a much broader economy of relationships and practices.

1.2 Writing and Communication

It is neither possible nor desirable to completely disentangle writing from other forms of communication or from lived experience in general, as the example of the specials board at the beginning of Section 1.1 illustrated. Written communication can only ever fully make sense in terms of the world in which it is embedded and to which it always, in some way or another, refers. Writing just can’t be levered apart from human relations or from the long history of its development. The history of writing shows how people have used the materials at hand to record, store, distribute and respond to information. In this sense, writing is, and always has been, both a social and a material affair.

Written words are a form of linguistic communication, and they are dependent on a set of distinctive rules and conventions. As such they have a complex and dynamic relationship with spoken language. The idea that writing is just a visual representation of speech is an oversimplification, since writing always employs a particular notational system (such as an alphabet or set of characters) and specific rules (of spelling and syntax), both of which are governed by their own conventions of representation, variation and combination. Over time, writing has also developed some specific functions, its own stylistic conventions and its own distinctive expressions and genres, and these also distinguish it from spoken language. For example, in contemporary European culture, there is no direct spoken equivalent of a signature, you’re unlikely to wish someone happy birthday using the phrases found in a greeting card or speak to them in the language of a formal letter – and although some written texts like legal statutes and novels can be read aloud, they are certainly not designed with that in mind.

If speech and writing have a complex and dynamic relationship, how might that relationship be described? It’s clearly not a symbiotic relationship since it is quite possible to make sense of a written script without knowing the spoken language it relates to. Experts on ancient Cuneiform writing, scholars of Sanskrit and those familiar with Latin may have an impression or opinion on how words in related languages may have sounded when spoken, but they are not members of a living speech community. Similarly, someone who is a little bit familiar with a language that makes use of the same script as their own can make some headway in reading that language, particularly with some knowledge of its intonation – but that is not the same thing as being able to speak it. A text-based education in French has left me, and many of my generation, reasonably fluent in the written form, but fairly hopeless in everyday conversation. And, in many parts of the world, the official written language is based on a standard variety that not everyone speaks. For example, written Mandarin is related to the language of the Han Chinese, but this may vary quite considerably from what is spoken locally in Guangzhou, Hong Kong or Shanghai. Evidence of what I’ve called the dynamic relationship between spoken and written language is easy to illustrate with reference to Shakespeare. The plays, now dependent on the written form, reflect some of the contours of spoken Elizabethan English – but also, as scholars have been quick to point out, vocabulary and common idioms that seem to first appear in Shakespeare have now found their way into everyday spoken language. This illustrates a sort of two-way relationship between speech and writing. A written language can borrow from spoken language (and vice versa) in a way that is mutually enriching, but the two language systems remain separate in important ways. With these examples in mind, writing might be best described as a semi-autonomous form of linguistic communication with a set of clear distinguishing features – arguably a language in its own right. But there is one crucially important distinguishing feature: writing, unlike speech, has a material presence and a visual form, being made up of more or less durable marks or impressions on a surface or screen.

1.3 Writing and the World

Writing as a visual form has a relation to the world as seen, felt, experienced and imagined. In some schools of thought, this relationship is seen as part of the context of writing. For instance, traffic information, public notices and fingerposts derive their meaning from where they are placed in the environment and are meant to be read in relation to their immediate contextual surroundings. Because writing must be visible, it easily combines with other visual modes of representation. It often appears with still and moving images (think of advertisements and subtitles) and with other notation systems such as numerals, measurements or musical symbols. An interesting feature of contemporary screen-based communication is that it brings together different media to expand the possibilities of meaning making. For example, many of us regularly use multimodal texts – texts that combine writing, visual representation and sound, and we do this on a daily basis.⁶ Frequently visited websites and social media platforms exploit the multimedia possibilities available. Despite its everyday and sometimes banal content, communication through WhatsApp is a good example of the complex blending of voice notes, conversational writing and still and moving images.

Two key points emerge from the discussion so far. Firstly, as I have argued throughout this chapter, we can’t completely disentangle writing from its communicative context – and this includes the world at large as well as other forms and modes of communication. Secondly, we have to be clear that specific rules and conventions apply to writing that distinguish it from speech. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily formally agreed or even referred to – often they are just implicitly adhered to. But conventions of writing have to be learnt, even if they are not explicitly taught. This learning involves everything from the size and shape of letters or characters and how they combine, through to the structuring of complex texts. Because much of this involves conventions, rather than inviolable laws, there’s always some scope for variation, always some fuzziness around the detail at all levels (hence the seemingly endless arguments on what constitutes proper letter formations or correct grammar). Nor are these conventions unchanging. In fact, the conventions I’m referring to operate rather like a tacit social contract that is continually being refined and renegotiated. Writing in this sense is very much a part of the world that we experience.

Most of the time a fluent reader takes writing at face value – the meaning appears to emerge from the written word with little or no effort at all. To all intents and purposes, this is an automatic process that is only derailed when a particularly complex or poorly worded sentence crops up, when there’s a typographic error or when the reader meets an unfamiliar word – and then only briefly. In all probability, we are hard-wired to make meaning, and so the drive to understand and to make sense of writing takes precedence over the recognition and recall of words and word fragments – those processes normally occur below the threshold of conscious awareness. All of that cognitive work is so well learned and so regularly practised that it is, for many of us, invisible most of the time.

1.4 Writing as a System of Symbols

Reading this page, we can be aware of the rather neat array of black shapes in front of us, we can be aware that they are lined up on a white background and that we follow their lead from left-to-right and top-to-bottom of the page or screen. The way in which these rather strange dark squiggles march across the page in response to my rather clumsy plonking on the keyboard seems like a small miracle, yet this is all a product of well-worn habits of reading and writing that depend on a working, automized familiarity with a system of linguistic symbols – a set or collection of marks that communicate information to the reader – someone who is sufficiently familiar with the conventions of that system. This process is part of the magic of writing, one of the many ways in which someone else’s thoughts and ideas, or ways of doing something, are told, how their imagined worlds or everyday experiences are conveyed, how services are offered, arrangements or agreements reached. All of these can be communicated to us through this rather unusual collection of squiggles. As Aileen Douglas⁷ observes:

In other words, legibility is an essential aspect of written communication. What is written must be legible to the reader; but once it is legible, materiality may fade into the background as meaning becomes foregrounded.

At the heart of this communication process is the way in which specific marks on a visible surface appear on their own or in combination in order to represent words. This is the essential characteristic of a modern writing system. Looking across different writing systems, we might see this in the way the Chinese character 鈴 represents the word ‘ling’ (bell), or in the way that the Arabic word َﻣﺎﺀ stands for ‘maa’ (water). Although these writing systems operate in different ways and have different histories, for the time being it is important to recognize a fundamental principle. That is that the symbols of modern writing systems combine as words, phrases and clauses – as a language rather than a visual representation of things themselves. There is no direct relationship between the word m-o-o-n, as it is written on the page and the beautiful appearance that can light up the night-time sky. You could look at the word for as long as you like, upside down, the right way up, left-to-right or back to front and still not see the thing it refers to. Furthermore, despite the popular idea that Chinese is more pictorial as a language, there’s nothing about 鈴 that rings out of the page to suggest the word bell, just as there is nothing remotely wet about the word َﻣﺎﺀ.

What I referred to as ‘magic’ actually turns out to be a finely tuned system of visually mediated language. Most likely we have forgotten the struggles, hesitations and frustrations of learning to read and write, of mastering a particular code or codes, but this learning, when successful, becomes so automatic that we can attend to the meaning of messages, rather than the system of representation. In the case of descriptive writing we can conjure up people, places and events in our imagination; through a string of text messages, we may be able to work out what’s on our friend’s mind or simply know where and when to meet him. In each case, the message can be imperfectly or inaccurately realized – but perhaps all communication proceeds through a judicious combination of approximation, hypothesis and guesswork. It is perhaps just as well then that written language as a medium gains a degree of precision from a reasonably predictable set of rules and conventions. The relationships discussed above could be provisionally mapped out diagrammatically (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Writing and representation

This relationship between writing and representation is a key question in semiotics, and debates about the nature of such representation have troubled modern linguistics as well as educational debates about the teaching of writing.⁸ Sometimes misunderstandings have their origin in the everyday way in which we seem to automatically associate a written word with an object in the world, but they can also originate in the tendency to take our own alphabetic system of writing as a template for all writing systems. Any robust account of writing must be able to account for all writing systems (including, for example, those of the 1.5 billion speakers of Chinese and the large populations that use Hindi, Arabic or Russian on a daily basis). The key test for a model of representation such as the one in Figure 1.2 lies in its ability to account for different writing systems.

Let’s test this model for three writing systems: modern Arabic, modern Mandarin and ancient Cuneiform. Firstly, Arabic. Here we have a writing system that uses a notational script and a right-to-left directionality – one that is obviously quite different from the English alphabetic script. Arabic writing is used to represent many different languages including Somali, Farsi and Urdu. It is also the scriptural language of Islam and the language of the Quran. Like English, Arabic uses an alphabetic system or ‘abjad’ of twenty-eight letters. The technical term ‘abjad’ was coined by Daniels⁹ to describe a notation system based only on consonants. In Arabic, these consonants are written in a cursive script, whereas vowels, when they are needed, are represented by diacritics – those dashes and dots that appear above or below the letters. The Arabic system uses combinations of this abjad to construct, or spell, words such as َﻣﺎﺀ (‘maa’ – water). This notational system works phonetically in a way that is consistent with the model in Figure 1.2.

Mandarin uses an entirely different approach, best described as a character-based system. Individual characters, used either singly or in combination, represent words. Not only does Mandarin look completely different as a notational system, it is based on a completely different logic. There is no phonetic correspondence or spelling involved, only the graphical components (originally brushstrokes) that make up characters. Traditionally, Mandarin was written from right to left in vertical columns, beginning at the top right-hand side and progressing to the bottom of the page. More recently, a horizontal, left-to-write directionality has become more or less standard. Mandarin uses a logographic approach to notation – characters stand for words or parts of words. Despite all its differences and its recent changes, we can see that Mandarin is a rule-governed writing system for representing words.

Looking at Cuneiform is an interesting contrast to the examples used so far. Here we are dealing with one of the oldest writing systems we know of, one that is not in contemporary use and one that has no obvious connection with a living speech community. Cuneiform is the name given to the wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets, dating back to around 3200 BCE, recovered from Mesopotamia and now housed in museums around the world. This system of writing was used for at least two languages, Sumerian and Akkadian. Specific combinations of the wedged imprints were initially used to represent syllables. The fact that Cuneiform was extinct for nearly 2,000 years until it was deciphered in the 1850s makes it an interesting test case. Before then, and after it had fallen into disuse, it might have been recognized as a writing system, but decoding it remained a mystery. Through a series of exercises of transliteration that enabled the comparison of Cuneiform with familiar and readable scripts, scholars were slowly able to crack the code to reveal the languages that were being expressed. Only then were we able to read Cuneiform by working out which languages the syllabic notation approximated to. And as a result of this, historians have been able to gain fascinating insights into the lives of the people who used it. This has included some of the earliest recipes, laundry receipts and poetry, as well as letters, official records, everyday arrangements, legal documents and texts referring to religious and supernatural matters. All this is achieved through a syllabic writing system used to refer to the world as experienced, felt or imagined (see Figure 1.2).

What Arabic, Mandarin and Cuneiform have in common, then, is the systematic use of a set of marks or symbols that constitute a language. I have been referring to those marks as a system of notation. There are, of course, other notational systems such as those used for music and mathematics, but they don’t combine in the way that languages do. Writing is distinct because it is a form of communication based on a linguistic system of meaning making. This is a semi-autonomous system that enjoys a dynamic relationship with spoken languages – and it is never anything other than visual. The messages on my iPad just like those on Sumerian clay tablets, and Roman wax tablets have this in common: they provide a visual display of a readable notation system for communicating meaning. In order to write, we need to be able to make our own marks on these tablets – or on any surface or screen.

1.5 A Technology for Writing

All this adds up to a recognition that writing as a visible language must always have a material form. It must involve a process of mark making. Writing has to leave an impression whether its chiselled into stone, laser printed on a box or displayed on a billboard. It has to have a certain durability in order to communicate – although, admittedly, some writing may have a very brief appearance. Skywriting is quickly blown away and a finger-written message on a steamy mirror won’t last long. Other writing with a much longer shelf-life would include the Cuneiform clay tablets I referred to earlier on as well as the Mayan writing of meso-America carved on standing stones and public monuments. And since writing is a material phenomenon – a visual language system, those marks have to appear somewhere. This is what I shall refer to in what follows as the display principle.