What is the central idea of writing?

Answer 1

Writing has traditionally served two purposes: to preserve information and to communicate where it is not possible for people to speak.

The preservation of information is seen at its earliest by the records written by the ancients of the deeds of their kings. For example, think of the heiroglyphic carvings on Ancient Egyptian monuments. Such writing needs to be clear and the language it is written in needs to be passed on to succeeding generations. Because the language of the Ancient Egyptians was not passed on we were almost unable to read those writings.

Long distance communication was made possible by writing. If two people were not able to talk to each other, they could send a courier with an oral message, but the message might get garbled. A written message, so long as it was written clearly and without ambiguity, was preferable.

Both of these purposes require more careful use of language than that used when speaking. When speaking it is possible to say,"I don't understand that. Can you rephrase it?" but that is impossible if the person who wrote it is dead or difficult and annoying if it takes 6 months for a message to be delivered.

The telephone made the use of letters for communication only important when it was important to have a record of the conversation. Thus preservation became the most significant purpose of writing. Nevertheless we have seen in the popularity of instant messaging and then texting people who write to each other for no reason at all--they could easily talk to the other people who are on the other end of the line anyway, and nothing is being said which needs to be saved for posterity. These kinds of pseudo-writing do not require the care that writing generally does because the message is instantaneous and misunderstandings can be easily corrected, and so resembles speech more than written language.