Page 71 - Literacy in the New Media Age

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WHAT IS LITERACY?
Resources of the mode of writing

‘Writing’ or ‘literacy’?

In the era of the screen and of multimodality some fundamental changes are
inevitable as far as forms, functions and uses of writing are concerned. Maybe
first and foremost there is the question of how the modes of image and writing
appear together, how they are designed to appear together and how they are to be
read together. There is the question then – a real question – in what direction
writing is likely to move: will it move back towards speech-like forms, and
become mere transcription of speech again, or will it move back in the direction
of its image origins? And there is the old question of the resources of the mode
of writing. In this book I cannot provide a grammar of writing, so in this chapter
I focus on two aspects of this resource: the (relation of clause and) sentence, and
the processes of transformation which operate at all levels, in forming sentences,
in forming below-sentence structures, and in forming word-like entities. My
purpose is to indicate two broad features or elements of writing, and to give a
sense of the productive or generative potentials of the mode.
Whenever there are two terms that seem to name the same thing, it is worth
asking whether there is after all some difference. Perhaps the terms describe the
issue from different perspectives, or maybe we really do have an instance of that
mythical thing, a synonym. So far I have insisted that a writing system, or
writing itself, is not necessarily the same as ‘literacy’, which is – for me –
writing with letters. The history of the word writing (the word is writan in Old
English) is revealing in that respect. Its etymology shows that it belongs to a
family of words which no longer has any relatives in contemporary English, but
does in languages such as German, Dutch and Swedish, with words such as
reissen, to tear, or ritzen, to scratch, in German; rita, to draw, in Swedish; and
rijten, to tear, in Dutch. Writing, in the earlier history of the people of that part of
northern Europe, was to scratch marks, the runes, into thin boards of soft beech-
wood, or into stone. The word named the act of scratching, of scoring, of
engraving, just as the word grammar – Greek in origin – comes from a root,