Beyond the Elements of Style

I’ve been thinking about writing lately.

Not books per se, but actual writing. Most of my academic background has been in history, and in particular Celtic history, and theat’s where I begin. The Celts had the Ogham alphabet and Scandinavian runes, but it was still an oral tradition. Early monks in the islands concentrated on writing and preserved whatever local lore they found important, interesting, or useful. So perhaps it was Christianity that preserved the Celtic tradition!

It’s a good reminder, that writing came late to storytelling. And the reality is that writing doesn’t come naturally to anybody. Writing isn’t a natural endeavor. Writing has to be both taught … and learned.

Sumerian culture was one of the first to teach writing … children went to schools where they copied cuneiform, using something to symbolize something else. And when they did that, their brains actually changed.

In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf explains how writing affects neurological development:

The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words (…) and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.

So writing is good for us. But we’re doing it less and less. I’m not talking about writing the way that I’m writing this blog——my fingers moving across a keyboard to put the words on a screen. No: I’m talking about writing. By hand.

Of course this isn’t recent. We’ve been drifting further and further away from handwriting as a way of life since Gutenberg invented the printing press. Scholar Anne Trubek notes that

when a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

So now you’ll meet people who hold, proudly, that they still “write real letters,” adding that real letters are those written by hand, and feeling a strange sort of moral superiority over those who don’t. It makes one wonder who will be clinging virtuously to keyboard writing when the next technological revolution has us all addressing our computers via voice.

But what do we do in the meantime? Stop teaching cursive writing? Make sure it’s seen as the Holy Grail of writing?

What about you? Do you still write with a pen? Tell me all about it, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!