Written language is a supreme achievement that distinguishes humans from animals. For many millions of people across the world, being literate gives access to vital parts of social and cultural life, and being illiterate results in more limited opportunities. For employment as an academic, journalist, and of course writer, writing is central to the work. For professional people, writing is a main vehicle for getting work done. For other jobs, writing is vital to efficient practices including health and safety. And for many people, writing as a source of pleasure, recreation, and reflection is what they value most. One thing all writers have in common is the challenge to write well. The challenge for a tiny minority is to reach ‘immortality’ in their writing, but for most people the challenge is making writing effectively reflect the meanings and messages they want to create and communicate. For children, the challenge is learning to write in the first place, and for teachers the challenge is helping their learners to do this. But in spite of the thousands of years of history of writing, and in spite of its global use today, writing has attracted less attention from researchers, particularly compared to oral language and reading.
The beginning of my exploration of writing was informed by both seminal and more recent books written by people with different kinds of relevant expertise, for example by classicists (e.g. Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write), philosophers (Aristotle, On Interpretation), anthropologists (Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral), cognitive scientists (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct), psychologists/educationalists (David Olson, The World on Paper), linguists (David Crystal, The Stories of English), literary/media theorists (Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy), journalists (Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves), and accounts by writers (Stephen King, On Writing). In answer to a question about the origins of his poems the poet Ted Hughes said:
Well, I have a sort of notion. Just the tail end of an idea, usually just the thread of an idea. If I can feel behind that a sort of waiting momentum, a sense of some charge there to tap, then I just plunge in. What usually happens then – inevitably I would say – is that I go off in some wholly different direction. The thread end of an idea burns away and I’m pulled in – on the momentum of whatever was there waiting. Then that feeling opens up other energies, all the possibilities in my head, I suppose. That’s the pleasure – never quite knowing what’s there, being surprised. Once I get onto something I usually finish it. In a way it goes on finishing itself while I attend to its needs. It might be days, months. Later, often enough, I see exactly what it needs to be and I finish it in moments, usually by getting rid of things.Footnote 1
Hughes was not only a great poet, he was also interested in how people learn to write, so much so that he published a book on the matter, Poetry in the Making, subtitled A Handbook for Writing and Teaching. The aims behind Hughes’ book prompt a wider question about the ways in which writing and language might be taught and learned. If people are to learn, there needs to be some agreement about things to be taught and the best ways of doing so.
One of the first examples of a book designed to teach English language use was published in no less than 100 editions. The author became a household name in the UK and in the USA, and a citation to his name was even used by Charles Dickens in Dombey and SonFootnote 2. And the title of this book?:Footnote 3
The author, John Walker (1732–1807), had a first job as a professional actor, including a run in London’s Covent Garden. But his second career was as an educator: initially setting up his own school. After a disagreement with the co-founder of the school, Walker took up the teaching of elocution, at which he excelled. So much so that he was soon educating royalty. His major contribution was a theory of inflections. His attention to the pitch of the voice built on the work of Joshua Steele who had investigated vocal pitch in relation to music.Footnote 4 As is clear from the title of Walker’s book, he was concerned that young people should learn to use language ‘correctly’ as he saw it. However, his wasn’t a book about the composition of writing but more about other important elements of language. Books directly about writing were to come later.
How Writing Works is about the process of writing: the place of meaning as the driving force of writing; and the ‘ear of the writer’ that enables writing. The work on the book was driven by the following questions:
In what ways does meaning drive writing?
How should we understand writing theoretically?
How do key moments in the history of writing enable us to reflect on writing now?
What are the relationships between the composition of meaning, and the technical elements of writing such as structure, sentences, words, letters, and sounds?
What are the relationships between oral and written language?
How are conventions and standards of language established and applied, and in what ways do and should they impinge on writing?
What is the nature of creativity in writing?
And consequently: how does writing work and therefore how is writing best taught?
Although the book does make occasional comparisons with other languages, when appropriate, its main focus is on writing in English. My intention is to present a new and more complete account of the process of writing. By way of introduction to some of the themes of the book, and I hope as a means to engage you, I begin with seven short stories of writing.
1
It was a cold morning and the sky was brilliant blue. The crowd waited expectantly. A countdown commenced. At ‘zero’ the roar of rocket engines vibrated through people’s chests. The shuttle moved slowly at first, as if the shackles would stop it escaping, but then with gargantuan force its forward momentum quickened. The white of its tiled hull, and the white smoke from the rockets, contrasted strongly with the blue sky. In a few short minutes, the shuttle was out of sight and had left the earth’s atmosphere. At NASA’s Mission Control the pictures of the Columbia Space Shuttle’s orbit were clear, and radio contact with the crew was fully functional.
While one of the NASA mission control team had been watching the launch, he thought he spotted something. On playback of the launch video, 82 seconds in, the scientist saw what looked like a small object bouncing off the wing of the shuttle. He alerted his manager. Emergency meetings were convened. PowerPoint presentations of technical information were discussed.
Having considered the PowerPoint slides, high-level NASA officials decided that the Columbia was not in danger, and further investigations were not necessary, not even the option of powerful military spy cameras that could have photographed any damage to the Shuttle for further analysis.
Twelve days later, on 1 February 2003, the Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.
The Columbia disaster was a tragic event that highlighted the risks astronauts take in the exploration of space. An uncomfortable aspect of the Columbia disaster was that writing, in the particular structural and communicative form of the PowerPoint presentation package, was seen as a contributing factor in the disaster because it resulted in key messages being missed. ‘Death by PowerPoint’ could never have been more serious or literal.
The problem with PowerPoint involved the ways in which meaning was structured. Bullet points at higher levels, and in the executive summaries, suggested that Columbia was safeFootnote 5. Technical points that suggested that fatal damage to the shuttle was a possibility were lower in the textual hierarchy of bullet points. At the same time the PowerPoint slides were being produced, NASA engineers were exchanging emails (more simply structured texts) about what they saw as a credible danger.
A formal report into the tragedy by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that:
As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realise that it addresses a life-threatening situation.
At many points during its investigation, the board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.Footnote 6
2
Pierre was happy. He had finished work for the day and was free to spend a precious hour or two on his hobby. A few months ago, he had found Arithmetica, a new translation of ferociously difficult mathematical problems. He had already easily solved seven of the problems in the Arithmetica. Most of the problems required extended mathematical proofs written out in lengthy series of equations. But Pierre was impatient to get through, so as a shortcut he would begin the solution to a problem, then when he was certain he could solve it, leave a note, sometimes in the margin of the page he had got to. While solving problem number eight in the Arithmetica Pierre realised that there were some intriguing possibilities. One in particular excited him. Having thought about possible solutions his mind was certain. He wrote in the margin:
Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. [I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.]Footnote 7
And what was the proposition? There is no whole-number solution to xn + yn = zn. In other words, although we can find whole-number solutions to Pythagoras’ theorem x2 + y2 = z2, it is not possible to solve the equation if n is a whole number greater than two.
This was how one of the most famous mathematical problems of all time, and an associated prize, was established some 300 years ago as a result of the note from the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat.Footnote 8 The proposition became known as Fermat’s last theorem.
It is extraordinary enough that a simple handwritten note in the margin of a notebook should attract and challenge the world’s greatest mathematicians for 300 years. And the physical survival of Fermat’s written notes over such a long period of time is in itself impressive. This was only made possible because Fermat’s eldest son, Clément-Samuel, realised the importance of his father’s hobby, so he carefully collected and published the notes and thoughts that his father had scribbled onto his copy of Arithmetica.
The note Fermat left in the margin is only the starting point for this story. When Andrew Wiles was a child, he came across an account of the riddle of Fermat’s last theorem. Unlike most children, Wiles was intrigued straight away. He even made an attempt to solve the problem on the assumption that as Fermat was an amateur mathematician, and as Wiles knew as much mathematics as Fermat knew, he could perhaps solve it. He soon realised, like so many mathematicians throughout history, that the problem was very difficult indeed.
It wasn’t until Wiles went to the University of Cambridge that he started to think seriously about what might be involved in the solving of Fermat’s last theorem. At first Wiles knew that he had to familiarise himself with major areas of complex mathematics. One area of maths that would one day be useful to him was the elliptical equations recommended by his tutor at Cambridge.
An unusual feature of Wiles’s approach to the problem was to break with the tradition of collaboration that mathematicians in the modern era have adopted, by working alone and with complete secrecy. One of the reasons for this was the fear that if he shared some of his work, having made progress on solving the problem, another mathematician might supply the final piece in the jigsaw and claim the lucrative prize. Wiles even pretended to be working on elliptical equations, and published a series of minor papers so that he would not be suspected of his work on the theorem. But the other reason for his solitude was in order to maintain the high levels of concentration without distraction, over seven years, that Wiles knew would be necessary. In a description of the mental space required for creativity, Wiles said:
Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to really think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.Footnote 9
Wiles also described the moment when he finally solved the problem.
One morning in late May, Nada [his wife] was out with the children and I was sitting at my desk thinking about the remaining family of elliptical equations. I was casually looking at a paper of Barry Mazur’s and there was one sentence there that just caught my attention. It mentioned a nineteenth-century construction, and I suddenly realised that I should be able to use that to make the Kolyvagin-Flach method work on the final family of elliptical equations. I went on into the afternoon and I forgot to go down for lunch, and by about three or four o’clock I was really convinced that this would solve the last remaining problem. It got to about tea-time and I went downstairs and Nada was very surprised that I’d arrived so late. Then I told her – I’d solved Fermat’s Last Theorem.Footnote 10
Wiles chose to announce his discovery at a conference at the Sir Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge. In a series of three lectures, it was not obvious in the first two lectures what Wiles was going to announce, but lecture by lecture the rumours grew, and by the time of the third lecture the atmosphere was electric. With the words ‘I think I’ll stop here’, Wiles had solved the riddle.
Or had he? In order for the prize to be awarded Wiles’s paper had to go through the standard procedure of peer-review, where experts in the same field review the paper and decide whether its argument is correct. One problem was that no other single person in the world had the same expertise. So the journal editor appointed six reviewers who would each look at one of the six sections of what was a document of more than 100 pages.
One of the referees emailed a series of questions to Wiles which he answered easily. But then there was a question for which his answer did not satisfy the reviewer. Wiles was in turmoil. After seven years of work and a public announcement that generated press coverage around the world, it appeared that he had not after all solved the riddle.
Wiles was resigned to simply learning from the mathematics he had successfully done. But after six months of additional work, he had a revelation:
I realised that, although the Kolyvagin-Flach method wasn’t working completely, it was all I needed to make my original Iwasawa theory work. I realised that I had enough from the Kolyvagin-Flach method to make my original approach to the problem from three years earlier work. So out of the ashes of Kolyvagin-Flach seemed to rise the true answer to the problem … It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant. I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it and I just stared at in disbelief for twenty minutes. then during the day I walked around the department, and I’d keep coming back to my desk looking to see if it was still there. It was. I couldn’t contain myself. I was so excited. It was the most important moment of my working life. Nothing I ever do again will mean as much.Footnote 11
Wiles’ mathematical proof, 108 pages divided into five ‘chapters’, are notable for the story I have told but also, in themselves, as a variant of written language: the language of very high level maths, which as you can see is not just numbers but has a clear narrative in words (something that is clear from the first page of the published proof, Figure 0.1).
Figure 0.1 One page of Wiles’ mathematical proof of the solution of Fermat’s last theorem. Wiles, A. ‘Modular elliptic curves and Fermat’s Last Theorem’. Annals of Mathematics, 142, (1995), 443–551.
3
In 1979, age 15, I became interested in computer technology. The full extent of computer resources in my secondary school was one ‘tele printer’ machine. This was the size of a small desk and consisted of an electronic typewriter keyboard and a paper spool (about the width of A4 paper). You typed a line of computer code which then was sent down the telephone line to a mainframe computer (often described as a computer that filled a whole room), then some seconds later the response came back printed on the spool of computer paper that was part of the tele printer. My curiosity was not dimmed by this very basic technology – in fact at the time it seemed rather exciting!
In 1977 one of the first PCs that would reach people’s homes was presented at the US West Coast Computer Faire, it was called the Commodore PetFootnote 12. Three years later I was using this computer to write the computer programme for a project as part of the first nationally available A Level in computer studies in the UK. One third of the assessment of this A level was a practical project that required the writing of a computer programme.
The writing of a computer programme, like any writing, first and foremost requires the creation of a purpose for the programme, perhaps a problem to solve. My interest in music, including singing for the local church choir, had led to my involvement in church tower-bell ringing. Bell ringing beyond the most basic stages requires each bell ringer to learn the different bell ringing ‘methods’. A method is a particular combination of ‘changes’ to the sequence of bells rung. So, if there are six church tower bells being rung, the starting sequence is always what are known as ‘rounds’: bell one, bell two, bell three, four, five, six, with bell one being the smallest highest pitched bell called the ‘treble’, and the largest and lowest pitched bell called the ‘tenor’ (and by one of those curious coincidences the ‘Tower Captain’s’ surname was Alan Treble). A bell ringing method changes this sequence by allowing the ‘movement’ of bells from a starting position in the sequence, up or down one place in the sequence. For example, you can see in Figure 0.2 that the person ringing bell number two follows the path shown by the blue line (the darker vertical line in figure 0.2).
Figure 0.2 A bell-ringing ‘method’. Change Ringing Toolkit. ‘Method Diagram Plain Bob Minor.’ 2016.
The path of the blue line for their bell has to be memorised by the bell ringers.Footnote 13 My idea for the computer studies project was to create a simulation and teaching package for bell ringers (now inevitably there is a website devoted to this). The programme required the user to input the correct position of their bell using the numbers of the keyboard within a set number of seconds. When a correct answer was supplied, the screen added the relevant segment of the blue line (the bell’s path), and a connected amplifier was used to play the synthesised sound of the bells ringing the change. If an incorrect answer was supplied the computer would reveal the correct answer.
At the time of the Commodore PET, storage of programmes was on audio cassettes (small hard drives to fit inside computers had not been developed: at that time a hard drive was the size of a large suitcase). The Commodore’s total RAM (Random Access Memory) was 4KB which is 4,000 times less memory than my current mobile phone which has 16 GB.
The programming language I used was BASIC, a language that is still used in variants such as smart BASIC today. The writing of the computer programme was built as several ‘modules’. Figure 0.3 shows one page of the BASIC language that I wrote for one of the modules. The number 8850 indicates that it is a draft version of the programme at that moment, something corroborated by my note (‘255 not completely correct: odd [number] bells?’).
Figure 0.3 Extract of BASIC language from A Level project.
Looking at the programme and the report again after more than 30 years, I could barely understand its meaning, certainly not the detail of the logic. I’m assuming that most readers of this book will understand even less of the specific meanings. The submission of the project for the A Level assessment also required an account of the design of the project. Figure 0.4 is an extract from my account of the final version of the programme presented for the submission. Once again my understanding of the detail of the computing logic in Figure 0.4 has largely faded; in fact, it came as something of a surprise to think that I had accumulated this technical knowledge. The links between written language and memory are one of the many significant issues that surround moves from oral cultural to written culture. And the rapid developments in technology have already resulted in the need for new means of curation and research.
Figure 0.4 Extract from A Level account of computer programme.
4
The King and the Duke, two petty criminals or, as they pronounced themselves, ‘world renowned tragedians’, had taken an interest in Huck and Jim and joined them on their Mississippi river journey. On one of the many stops along the journey, in Arkansas, the King and the Duke took to the stage for the ‘sublime Shakespearian spectacle’ in a ‘one horse town’ in the Deep South of the US. With no lack of ambition they included in their performance Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, and Hamlet … extracts.
Regrettably for the King and the Duke the presence of a circus meant that only an audience of 12 people turned up. Much to the tragedians’ annoyance this small audience laughed all the way through, until they left well before the end of the show, apart from one boy who had fallen asleep. Not to be deterred by these ‘Arkansaw lunk-heads’ the King and the Duke decided that low comedy was the answer.Footnote 14
At first the audience thought the show was hilarious:
When the place couldn’t hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come onto the stage and stood up before the curtain, and made a little speech, and praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that ever was; and so he went on a-bragging about the tragedy and about Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it; and at last when he’d got everybody’s expectations up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come aprancing out on all fours, naked; and he was painted all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colours, as splendid as a rainbow. And – but never mind the rest of his outfit, it was just wild, but it was awful funny. The people most killed themselves laughing; and when the king got done capering, and capered off behind the scenes, they roared and clapped and stormed and haw-hawed till he come back and done it over again; and after that, they made him do it another time. Well, it would a made a cow laugh to see the shines that old idiot cut.
Then the duke he lets the curtain down, and bows to the people, and says the great tragedy will be performed only two nights more, on accounts of pressing London engagements, where the seats is all sold aready for it in Drury Lane …Footnote 15
The audience were outraged: ‘What, is it over? Is that all?’ Just as the stage was to be stormed, a judge who was in the audience suggested that perhaps if they wanted to avoid being the laughing stock of the town they should tell everyone else how good the show was, ‘Then we’ll all be in the same boat.’
This scene is just one of the myriad of comic scenes from Twain’s masterpiece. According to Ernest Hemingway, ‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.’Footnote 16 Twain, or Samuel L. Clemens, the writer and his work are of interest for a number of reasons. Huckleberry Finn is a great work partly for its reputation as a prime representation of literary realism.Footnote 17 This realism comes in no small part through Twain’s ear as a writer, demonstrated in his authentic representation of the grammar of the vernacular dialect of the Deep South. Twain’s voice as a writer was also reflected in the use of his nom de plume: his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was an accomplished journalist, and also a travel writer. His travel book Life on the Mississippi which drew in part from his experience as a Mississippi steamboat pilot had a strong influence on Huckleberry Finn (the name Mark Twain was a Mississippi boating term meaning the mark for two fathoms deep). The nature of Huckleberry Finn is also interesting from an educational perspective, or as a bildungsroman (from the German for education, bildung, and a novel, roman), as we see the young characters develop, though Huckleberry Finn’s ‘educational experiences that result in his final emergence as a mature young man’.Footnote 18
There are many fascinating things about Twain, including his essays and polemical writing, and his trademark all-white suit. But Twain was not just interested in doing the writing, he also was interested in the processes of writing, and more specifically publication, to the extent that his entrepreneurial spirit resulted in him establishing his own publishing company and publishing his own book, as my copy of the Penguin classics edition notes:
The text of this edition follows that of The Library of America’s edition of Mark Twain’s Mississippi Writings (1982), which in turn was based on that of the first American edition published on February 18, 1885, by Twain’s own publishing company.Footnote 19
The final twist in this story comes from when I saw The Paige CompositorFootnote 20 in the Mark Twain museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Here was another remarkable side to Twain’s character, the confidence to take risks, ruinous risks, and his determination in the face of adversity. Twain invested the equivalent of about $6,000,000 of his book profits and his wife’s inheritance into a printing machine that turned out to be unable to ‘compose pages’, forever requiring complex adjustments based on trial and error.Footnote 21 Bankruptcy was the result. But what was Twain’s response?: to undertake a very successful worldwide lecture tour that returned him to solvency.
5
SALIERIFootnote 22 Come. Let’s begin.
He takes his pen.
SALIERI Confutatis Maledictis.
…
MOZART The Fire.
SALIERI What time?
MOZART Common time.
Salieri writes this, and continues now to write as swiftly and urgently as he can, at Mozart’s dictation. He is obviously highly expert at doing this and hardly hesitates. His speed, however, can never be too fast for Mozart’s impatient mind.
MOZART Start with the voices. Basses first. Second beat of the first measure – A. (singing the note) Con-fu-ta-tis. (speaking) Second measure, second beat. (singing) Ma-le-dic-tis. (speaking) G-sharp, of course.
SALIERI Yes.
This is some of the dialogue from a scene in the film Amadeus. The composer, Mozart, is in his bed because he is dying. He is desperate to finish his final work: a work that has been described as a Requiem for his own death. Salieri, a lesser composer portrayed as intensely envious of Mozart but also acutely aware of his genius, struggles to scribe the music as Mozart impatiently dictates.
The writer Peter Shaffer had written the script for a successful play which then became a film. The writing of an outstanding screenplay that was nominated for 53 awards and won 25, including 8 Academy Awards and 4 Golden Globes, is itself a memorable story. But it is but a tiny fragment of the astonishing array of stories and meanings expressed as a consequence of Mozart’s Requiem, one of the greatest artistic works of all time from one of the greatest creative geniuses of all time. And with regard to the many myths and truths that surround the requiem Simon Keefe observes that attention to its reception has been underplayed in academic analyses:
Above all, reception draws attention to a fundamental feature of the Requiem’s ontological status, namely that our collective understandings of it derive from our imaginative (and often undifferentiated) engagement with fictional, quasi fictional, and factual circumstances of composition to a degree unrivalled perhaps by any other work in the Western canon.Footnote 23
In 1791 in conditions of secrecy Mozart was commissioned to write a requiem for the wife of Count Walsegg-Stuppach.Footnote 24 But as Mozart worked on the Requiem he became gravely ill. On the day he died, from his bed he asked for the score to be brought to him. ‘Didn’t I predict that I would write this Requiem for myself?’Footnote 25 And as reported in Tales from the StaveFootnote 26, having said these words, with tears in his eyes he once more looked through the score attentively; it was a last glance, a painful farewell to his beloved art, a glimpse of immortality. In steady handwriting, but with the ink becoming gradually more faint, the final music Mozart ever wrote was to accompany the words, ‘And let them, Lord, pass from death to life’ (‘Fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam’). The very last words he wrote were also on the Requiem score. The meaning of Mozart’s last words is that the musicians should repeat (Da Capo) the section called ‘Quam olim’ (‘Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus’: which was promised to Abraham and his descendants).
Mozart’s last words are part of yet another extraordinary story that happened nearly two hundred years later. At the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958 one of only two original versions of Mozart’s Requiem score was on display. Someone tore from the page of the score Mozart’s handwritten instruction for ‘Quam Olim Da Capo’, no doubt knowing that this was the very last thing Mozart wrote (Figure 0.5 is a scan from this original score).
Figure 0.5 The last page of music and words Mozart wrote.
Mozart died leaving the Requiem unfinished, so the story of its writing continued: who could finish the work? The talented, experienced composer and friend of Mozart’s Joseph von Eybler was the first to agree to continue the work, but he gave up. The job then fell to Mozart’s inexperienced student, Franz Xavier Süssmayer. Süssmayer completed the score with love and respect but as he was not a particularly good composer some of his writing was clearly not up to the standard of Mozart’s. Although the Süssmayer version is the one most often performed, as a result of the dissatisfaction with it there have been six modern completions, each taking a different approach to sources.Footnote 28
The contributions of other composers to Mozart’s Requiem raises questions of authorship, authenticity and ownership: to what extent is the music by Mozart? On one of the only two original manuscripts, held at the Austrian National Library, Constanza’s second husband marked the sections that belonged to Mozart and those that belonged to Joseph Eybler. As a result of studying these markings, and their knowledge more generally about the Requiem, Thomas Leibnitz and Nigel Simeone conclude that the heart and substance of the music is by Mozart. Simeone’s own parting words on the BBC Radio 4 programme were, ‘It is one of the most moving documents I have ever seen … heart-breaking … to see the last page he ever wrote … I just feel like weeping when I look at that page. It is unbearably moving.’
Just as the film script for Amadeus would not have been written if Mozart had not composed the Requiem, so the composition of the music by Mozart could not have been written without another form of writing, the requiem text. As a major element of the Catholic religion, the requiem text represents a form of standard language and convention. Throughout history, as each new pope has been anointed, he has recommended edits to the requiem text. Musically, the requiem text has resulted in some of the greatest choral music ever written including requiems by Verdi, Fauré, Brahms, and Britten.
6
The writer ‘Lone Dog’ of the American Yanktonais Nakota community (who were part of the larger tribe known as the Sioux) was the last known keeper of Winter Count, a record of time through the counting of winters (starting with the winter of 1800–1801; see Figure 0.6).Footnote 29
Figure 0.6 The Lone Dog Winter Count.
The meaning of each picture on the winter count is a summary, or mnemonic, of a whole year of the community’s history, from first snowfall one year to first snowfall the next year. The elders would meet to decide one momentous event from the year that would be a reminder of the whole year. The chosen event was then encapsulated in a picture painted on to an animal hide. If you look carefully, you may be able to work out which of the pictures recorded the Leonid Meteor Storm of 1833 that would have been seen by many people round the globe. For the Yanktonais Nakota community, significant shared meaning was expressed through pictures, and each picture summed up a whole year of events. A beautiful object, and a beautiful example of the way that pictures supported what was almost entirely an oral culture dependent on the transmission of the community’s history by its elders to each successive generation.
7
The Mozart Requiem mass and the example of the Columbia disaster that began this introduction, show us writing used to enact and record significant moments in human history. There is writing at our death, and there is writing to record our birth. Because writing is such a powerful part of being human it is also part of the lives of very young children. For the new-born baby, text is just another thing to be observed in the baby’s environment, but surprisingly soon it becomes something with which to explore and experiment. And after only a few short years, most young children begin the life-long journey to represent meaning in marks and writing.
Esther was about six years old. She had been asked by her teacher to write a story to prepare for England’s national tests in writing. She decided to call the story ‘The Tooth Fairy’, and it was written along these lines:
One day the tooth of a little girl called Chloe came loose then fell out of her mouth. Chloe noticed that the tooth was an unusual colour so she decided to show her mum.
‘Oh look, it’s orange’, said her mum. ‘That reminds me of a story. When I was a little girl like you the same thing happened to me. So I said to grandma, shall I throw my tooth away?’
‘Oh no,’ said grandma, ‘you should throw it into a fire.’
‘Why’, I said.
‘Try it and see.’
So I threw my orange tooth into the fireplace, and the fire went out.
The next day Chloe was playing in her garden when she smelled smoke. She looked towards the smoke and saw that the house next door had flames billowing out of the downstairs window. She ran to the low garden fence, pulled her orange tooth out of her pocket, and threw it through the fiery window. And you can guess what happened, the fire went out. A group of worried onlookers shouted, WELL DONE CHLOE!
Esther, as is typical of a girl her age, had enjoyed creating a story that required her to play with ways of making meaning. But it was in the process of the writing that another remarkable story was revealed. The first thing Esther wrote on her blank piece of paper was the title, and she spelled ‘Tooth Fairy’ as The Toth Fire. Her friend took one look at it and said, ‘That’s not how you spell “fairy”’! Quick as a flash Esther’s combative reply was, ‘It doesn’t say “fairy”, it says “fire”’. And, quickly rejecting her first idea for the writing, she proceeded to construct a completely new story that combined the ideas of a tooth and fire. In Esther’s mind, it was far better that she did this than concede that her friend was right about the spelling error!
*
The seven stories of writing were selected because they demonstrate the power, richness and diversity that characterise writing and its processes. The seriousness of the impacts of writing was evident in the space shuttle disaster, but also the ways in which text structure is profoundly linked with the expression of very precise meanings. There appeared to be a lack of clear understanding by some at NASA about the ways in which the communication of specific messages requires command and knowledge of not just the words but also the written form and the links between both. The failure to highlight the most important information prominently in a presentation, while also retaining important technical information, is a problem with balancing structural constraints of written form with the need to ensure meaning is clear. This problem is not with PowerPoint per se, it is one of the challenges of all writing.
In the second of my stories the mathematician’s struggle with a 300-year-old riddle that began life as a handwritten note in an obscure margin reveals a different form of written communication, mathematical proof, and the seven-year solitude of the lone writer ultimately transformed through engagement with the community of scholars. Because of this written note, the child Andrew Wiles had a dream. As an adult, his writing of a mathematical proof communicated a very special kind of meaning. This meaning was temporarily doubted by his peers, but finally his success was communicated in the writing of the world’s media. And the reason I know these stories? Because Simon Singh thought that the story of the solving of Fermat’s theorem could be told: and Singh’s wonderful bookFootnote 30 shows the way in which powerful storytelling is not just the preserve of fiction writers.
In recognition that all writers have personal histories of writing, but also to point to a different form of writing, the third story, of my experience of learning to code the computer language BASIC when at school, is a recognition that we are only at the beginning of a profound moment in the history of writing, and we continue to experience these digital developments.
The experiences and reflections of expert writers is an important element of the analysis underpinning the book, and the example of Mark Twain, as both exceptional author but also someone so seriously engaged with the processes of writing and publication that he tried to market a printing press, is a glimpse of what we might learn from such writers.
The fifth story, Mozart’s Requiem, is profoundly interesting for so many reasons. As a creative masterpiece that combines words and music to make meaning, it is in my view unsurpassed. The story of the processes of Mozart’s composition are so interesting in their own right that they have provided the stimulus for a play and a film, and repeated engagement by scholars of music. The torn and stolen fragment of manuscript lends yet another depressing story. Forms such as writing do not exist in some decontextualised world. They live and breathe through their meanings and their connections. Connections between composition of music and composition of text are necessarily part of work that combines the languages of music and words, but the connections are also important as a means to reflect upon writing more generally. The history of human creativity shows how powerful stories are realised through multiple reinterpretations that exist in many combinations of forms.
The wonder of the native American Indian’s solution to memory, in the sixth story, provides a link with the graphical forms that characterised some of the earliest forms of writing. The history of writing that I address in the second chapter of the book reveals how key developments took humans from pictures to the alphabet and into the digital age.
And finally, in the seventh story the driving force of meaning lies in so many places. The unusual stimulus of the friend’s observation provoked real creativity in the establishment of the overall meaning of a completely new story. Meanings were playfully expressed through orange teeth, stories within stories, and a classic childhood rite of passage: losing ‘baby’ teeth. And the true story about the process of writing showed how spelling is far from a mundane technical feature of writing but instead is inextricably bound up with effective expression of meaning. The example was also chosen as a reflection of our fascination with children’s development but also as an early signal of my intention to think about how literacy education might be better, including how governments set literacy policy, and the extent to which such policies reflect rigorous and robust evidence about what works in the teaching of writing.
The Chapters of How Writing Works
In many areas of research, there is growing recognition that advances in knowledge over the next 100 years will come from sophisticated understandings that draw across different academic disciplines and areas of human endeavour. This book’s analysis of how writing works draws on philosophy, psychology-neuroscience, social science, education, and the arts. As part of the multidisciplinary focus, and as part of the focus on arts, comparisons with music are drawn periodically throughout the book. Music is an interesting comparator because, like language, it exists in oral and written forms.
‘ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον’
(‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns’).
Debates continue on the place of orality and writing in Homer’s Odyssey, but long before Homer’s epic there were marks and pictures made by human beings that communicated meaning. Starting with the philosophers of Ancient Greece, Chapter 1 presents key theoretical ideas about language and writing, and outlines the multidisciplinary theoretical backdrop to the book’s arguments. Humans not only express meanings directly through writing but also have the unique capacity of metacognition, to actively and deliberately reflect on writing, and the ways in which meaning is expressed. Even as the ancient Greeks’ invention of the alphabet grew in use, they started thinking about what changes writing would bring. Plato suggested that the change was nothing short of revolution: an oral state of mind was to be replaced by a literate state of mind, and the key role in this was played by the Greek alphabetFootnote 31. Socrates explicitly discussed writing with his student Theaetetus, including the minutiae of syllables and letters, in the context of their conversation about knowledge. In modern times, findings from neuroscience suggest that the development of writing (and literacy) in young children permanently changes the brain, a further outcome of the influence of writing on thinking. And more recent thinking in philosophy, from the perspective of pragmatism, also offers important possibilities for understanding writing.
Chapter 2 is a history of writing. Some of the earliest known paintings, depicting animals to be worshipped and hunted, were seen on the walls of caves. The pictures and marks that were the beginnings of writing led ultimately to human beings’ greatest invention of all: the alphabet. Without the alphabet most other inventions would be impossible: no general theory of relativity; no jet engine; no solving of Fermat’s last theorem. The history of writing, from pictures through to the alphabet, is a story of incremental steps: first, hieroglyphs and pictograms to represent financial transactions; then, the move from rebuses to abstract determinatives; and finally, the supreme addition by the Greeks, of five characters to represent vowels added to the Proto-Canaanite alphabet of consonants. All these historical developments were driven by humans’ constant need to express meaning more clearly, less ambiguously, and in increasingly diverse ways.
The history of writing is also a story of technological changes. A change as important in magnitude as the internet, the invention of the printing press, occurred in the fifteenth century. This was revolutionary for many reasons. It transformed a world of anonymous writers and scribes into a new kind of consumer world with, for the first time, a reading public. The profound changes stimulated by printing included the standardisation of language, the beginnings of the concept of literary fame, the idea of intellectual property, and the change from knowledge controlled by elites towards democratisation of the written word. These trends would continue hundreds of years later, as part of the digital revolution.
If we accept that understanding writing requires a sense of the ways that language changes over time, appropriate ways of thinking about writing, and research from different disciplines, what are the practical lessons for improving writing? As I reveal in Chapter 3, interest in this area, and advice, is not in short supply. There are thousands of texts giving advice about writing (including one I’ve written myself). What is less common is an analysis of the patterns of guidance that the range of these texts offer. The modern guides to language and writing addressed in this chapter are descendants of John Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, which share the intent to describe and prescribe standards of language and writing.
The accounts of writing by eminent writers are a relatively untapped source of knowledge. From the complexities of creativity and composition, to the pragmatics of the room where writing takes place, there is the potential to learn a great deal. The writing processes of some of the greatest writers, that I analyse in Chapter 4, reveal their attention, first and foremost, to meaning at the level of the whole text. The generation of ideas for writing, the ‘problems’ that authors invent, the themes of their writing, the creative processes, and ultimately the precision of meaning that is expressed in their careful choice of words, phrases, and sentences, are processes that all writers can learn about and consider applying to their own writing.
Fiction or non-fiction writing is built on creativity, which consists of the pillars of originality and value, the subjects that are explored at the beginning of Chapter 5. Creativity is not unique to writers. Composers of music, artists, choreographers, architects, also create, and in some different ways so do mathematicians and scientists. Like writers, all meaning-makers use their craft to communicate particular meanings, with intended effects, to a desired audience.
Writing’s primitive origins teach us much about the central place of meaning. But there is another source of primitive writing: children’s writing. The genetic echoes of humans’ development of writing are still present in every young child’s journey to learn how to write. It is clear that children’s natural play with written marks is centred on meaning and its expression. Just as humans moved from oral language to pictures to alphabets, so too do children as part of their development. Research on how children best learn to write, and how they (and older people) can be taught to write, provides another powerful source of knowledge about writing and how to improve it. This is the knowledge from the discipline of education which is the central focus of Chapter 6.
The final chapter of the book features one last analysis of data: my own reflections as a writer of this book, and some of the biography of my work as a writer. The end of this chapter, and the book, draws conclusions about how writing works, and as a consequence how the teaching and learning of writing in a wide range of contexts might be improved.
