Ong: Writing is a Technology

Some years ago, I started praying on a regular basis, but it seemed like the words in mind disappeared as soon as I thought them. I couldn’t anchor my thoughts or my prayers in any significant way, and so I began writing down my prayers. I’m pretty sure God doesn’t care if I speak my prayers aloud, whisper them in my thoughts, or write them down, but to me it seemed like the written prayers were weightier, almost tangible.

I’m surprised I didn’t think of this sooner. Writing has always had a profound effect on the way I view the world.

In fact, writing isn’t something I choose to do as much as it’s something I must do.

Every morning I make lists of things that I want to accomplish. I walk around the house with a pen in my hand just in case I need to write something down. I obsessively take notes in meetings, in class, during conversations, while on the phone. I may never refer to the lists, the random thoughts, or the notes, but the process of writing situates the words in my mind, helps me remember my thoughts, and helps me organize random, abstract thoughts into cohesive, progressive, productive ideas.

I need to write in order to think the thoughts that I think.

Not only that, but I need to read what other people have written to develop those thoughts and to expand my understanding of various concepts.

I can’t be me without writing, and I know that intuitively, but it’s not something I think about much. It’s just who I am.

On some level, I think everyone should be able to write.

Ong says that writing is imperious; it sets itself up as the standard to which all should attain. It takes itself as “normative for human experience and thought” (19).

He argues that even if we believe writing is essential in our society, even if we believe it offers power to the writer and that it would be good if literacy were available to all, we should endeavor to understand “what natural human processes are before writing takes possession of consciousness” (19). We should become aware of what writing does to our mind, to our thought processes, what advantages it has, and what disadvantages.

Writing, as normative as it has become, is technology, whether it is written by hand or typed onto a screen. It is a tool humans have created. It is artificial. This isn’t a bad thing. Ong says that to “say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it” (23). Indeed, writing “is essential for the realization of fuller, interior, human potential,” and it is an exterior aid to “interior transformations of consciousness” (23). When I write down my thoughts, my thoughts speak to me. I speak to them. I add to them. I can develop new ways of doing things that matter to me. I can help other people. Ong cautions that these “transformations of consciousness can be uplifting, but they can also be alienating” (23). Writing “distances” our thoughts from their natural spoken habitat so that we can view them from another perspective, raising our consciousness, giving us the potential for a “fuller human life” (23).

I don’t tend to think about the distance created when I put my thoughts onto a paper, but it’s true. Writing gives me the ability to say something and look at something from another angle. It gives me the ability to walk away and return to ideas later, to alter them, to extend them, to reorganize them in a more effective way.

The distance can be powerful.