-1Clay Laucella | COMM3052 Reading Notes | Week#2 | Ong (1968)
Section 1 (About 2/3 Page)
Thesis: Writing is a skill that can increase consciousness
I. Books/Old text and where their text stands
A. “There is no way to directly refute a text”
B. You can’t argue with a writer past their life time, and refute what they have written, so the
thoughts and theories they have accumulated in their writing may be totally circumstantial to the
time period they were living in
II. Plato’s 4 reasons why he condemns writing
A. “pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind”
B. “writing destroys memory”
C. “a written text is basically unresponsive” – connection to Ong?
D. “the written word cannot defend itself as the natural spoken word can” – connection to Ong?
III. Writing is a technology
A. Plato is talking about how solely technology Is artificial and how it could never compare to oral
communication
B. The ability to write and the process of putting spoken language into something tangible is
governed by your ability to string together thoughts and expand on your consciousness as a
human being
C. “The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensity its
interior life” is saying that writing itself can be a technology/tool, but not one that is detrimental
to humans itself, but rather a stepping stone to greater consciousness
Section 2 (About 1/3 Page)
I really agree with what Ong is talking about with how writing can serve as a tool that can enrich and
benefit a person’s overall spirit and consciousness, because personally I find myself being able to
remind, recite, and teach people concepts and information better after I have written them down.
Sometimes, I even write things down more than once in order to retain that information even better. I
also agree with Plato though when he talks about how “the written word cannot defend itself as the
natural spoken word can” which is basically saying how malleable the spoken word is to the time period
than the written word is. People can be constantly be passing down information or better than
consciousness as the time periods change, but the written word will be forever stuck in the time in was
created, and there is nothing that can change those views.