How I Invented Writing Essay -- Writing Technology Invention Essays

Writing is, at its core, a technology. It allows us to take our thoughts and do them spatially in the physical world. Living in a culture where this practice is an every day occurrence, the physical nature of writing fluidly becomes part of our consciousness. This is what the conformation project exposed for me. Having to invent a writing technology forced me to see the importance of being able to easily put down my thoughts and carry with them visually. At this very moment I am transferring thoughts into lines, shaping, moving, juggling them around on the familiar square format of the page. This is a process I wanted to allow for with my own invented technology. The ability to work with your thoughts and shape them, as an artist shapes clay or mixes paints, is the most important asset of writing. The project called for the character of graphic materials to write up to 20 nomenclature. The first hurdle then was to try to find something as natu ral as possible. I had a little diversion looking up the world natural in a thesaurus as a starting point for ideas. Usual, normal, accepted, ordinary, stuck out immediately. Writing as a technology has evolved to the point where it might fit with these words. Innate and effortless were the next two words in my thesaurus. Certainly writing has become effortless in recent years, with the advent of the computer. You can erase, move, copy, and write at blinding speed. Effortless is definitely a word I would use but not for my invented technology. Physical, biological, environmental. These were words that were closest to what I was aiming for. With biological fueling my search, I went outside to scope out candidates to b... ...h, transportability, and permanence. Because of this its ability to communicate ideas is extremely hampered, and all the benefits of writing as we use it today are absent except for one. The goal I set out to achieve with my technology, t he single quality of giving physical form to thoughts, corpse intact. Works CitedBolter, Jay David. The New Dialogue. Writing Material Reading from Plato to the digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble, Ann Trubek. New York Longman, 2003. 75-86Duguid, Paul and John Seely Brown. The Social Life of Documents. Writing Material Reading from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble, Ann Trubek. New York Longman, 2003. 104-121Ong, Walter. Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought. Writing Material Reading from Plato to the Digital Age. Ed. Evelyn B. Tribble, Ann Trubek. New York Longman, 2003. 315-335