Here are two questions that came to my mind while reading Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy for class this week.
Question 1: Ong spends a good bit of time in Chapter 3 discussing the importance of memorization to education. Teachers demanded that students memorize and recite statements (55-56). I can recall having to recite my phone number and address and The Pledge of Allegiance in Kindergarten, and later the Preamble to the Constitution. However, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to recite anything from memorization. Ong believes, “Writing has to be personally interiorized to affect thinking processes” (56), which makes me wonder: How does our reliance on writing and independence from memorization affects our thinking and our learning?
I ask this question in part because lately I have found myself talking about how my memory has weakened and how it fails me. I have trouble remembering the plots of stories I’ve read within the past year, and I have trouble remembering which authors wrote which articles and what they are about. I am now beginning to think that my memory seems weak because I have not trained it nor kept it in good use and practice. I don’t have to remember cell phone numbers or email address because they can all be saved. I don’t have to remember much of anything because I can write it down. Now in graduate school, I no longer have tests for which I must memorize mathematical formulas or any other class material. I can write, look back at my notes for reference, and keep moving along. I’m known to say that I know how to use my resources and look back to documents to find what I need to know. Reading Ong makes me think I’m relying too much on writing and current technologies, and therefore letting my mind take it easy. When in reality, using memorization more often may help me use other parts of my brain and strengthen my mind. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think engaging in more memorization will improve my thinking and my ability to learn in ways that all the writing in the world may not be able to do (and I am not, in any way, putting down writing or saying less should be practiced).
Question 2: Ong states in Chapter 4, “Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary, I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself. But I never really talk that way to myself. Nor could I without writing or indeed without print” (101). I am not completely convinced that I never talk to myself the way I write in a diary. I admit that I have a conversational voice and a writerly voice. However, I feel like I can talk to myself the way that I write, especially the way I write in a diary. So I ask, does are writerly voice naturally differ from our oral/speaking voice? Does it depend on our purpose for writing and the audience we’re addressing? Can we even know the difference since writing is such a standard and (at least right now) seemingly natural part of our lives?
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Mary:
ReplyDeleteCertainly Ong would agree that writing has let us (you) decrease reliance on memory. We store things externally. The benefit is that we can use our minds for other thins (manipulating this information, for example). The question might be: what are the difference in the kind of knowledge and creation we get from a memory-intensive culture vs. an information processing culture? Certainly, the memory intensive one has serious limitations on the complexity of the structure, since it must all be stored in memory (no Joyce's Ulysses in oral culture).
I think your last sentence is crucial to question 2: how can we know in a culture dominated by writing? But also, if we do end up talking to ourselves in the way we talk to our diaries, isn't this because we've adopted the diary's voice, the written voice?