Page 74 - Literacy in the New Media Age

WHAT IS LITERACY? 63

resource of writing) either in alphabetic writing, or broadly in character-based
scripts, are just one aspect of what writing is. In large part this chapter will deal
with entities which are definitional of the resource of writing with the Roman
alphabet.

Writing as transcription

In previous chapters I have asked about the alphabet as a transcription system:
what does it transcribe, sounds or meanings? Here I want to ask that question of
writing-as-such, as a resource for transcribing, though I will also want to
consider writing as a resource for new making. What does writing transcribe? Is
it the means of transcribing the sounds of speech, or transcribing that which has
already been articulated silently in speech, even if not uttered? Is it the means for
the transcription of ideas, even complex ideas which get expressed in sentences?
And does this happen more or less directly? That is, is the graphic word directly
a transcription of the mentally held ‘concept’? Is the clause a transcription of an
event, directly, not via the intervention of intermediary elements? And the same
questions need to be asked of all the units of writing – of phrases, clauses,
sentences, even of the largest-level textual entities.
But in order to answer these questions we need a careful look at the resources
of writing as a mode for representation and communication, and at the
affordances of this mode. To do this, I will look at (just) some of the major
elements of that mode and some of the major processes in that mode, asking what
their potentials are. The element that I will focus on in the main is the sentence,
and an entity which stands on the border of word and syntax, the ‘nominal
(phrase)’. Looking at that means looking at the process of transformation, for it
is that process which is productive, is generative, in forming the units that writers
need in their writing to answer the needs of the moment. Throughout, I will try to
keep in mind the question or how and where speech and writing relate closely
enough for us to feel justified in maintaining the idea that they both are part of a
thing such as ‘language’.
So, in looking at the affordances of the resource of alphabetic writing – what
you can and cannot easily do with this resource – the elements that I will look at
closely are words and the changes which words undergo; clauses and their
relation both to ‘word’-nominal, through transformations, and to the sentence;
and texts and larger textual elements. I will look at the relations which these
elements contract with each other, and the processes in which they are involved.
This means looking at syntax in its triple role: as it relates to the making of
words and to their arrangements; as it works internal to the clause and to the
phrase; and in its role in the ‘external relations’ of clauses as they appear in
sentences. Writing is quintessentially about the making of texts, that is, units
which are complete in terms of their social environment, and complete in terms
of their internal cohesion and coherence. So I will look also at textual processes.