3 ms·
A really interesting book on the characteristics of written and printed letterforms is "The stroke" [0]. One really interesting thing is the way that writing a
by asolove 13y ago
A really interesting book on the characteristics of written and printed letterforms is "The stroke" [0].
One really interesting thing is the way that writing and reading have changed more than one might expect. A few anecdotes:
- Until some time in the middle ages, scribes did not consistently use spaces to designate word breaks. This was apparently an innovation of Irish monks. But it had important implications. Sounding out a string of letters is quite difficult. Our modern reading speed depends on the characteristic shapes of words, which only emerged once spaces were used consistently.
- Until relatively late, reading was a laborious process. And because the only things important enough to be written were worth reading slowly, no one much minded. One charge laid against the Jesuits was that they had developed a sinister method of reading silently rather than out loud(!) which allowed them to read much more quickly.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Stroke-Writing-Gerrit-Noordzij/dp/0907259308 http://www.amazon.com/The-Stroke-Writing-Gerrit-Noordzij/dp/...
- stan_rogers 13y agoAugustine found it worth remarking upon that Ambrose read silently. Many medieval letters and books started with something like "don't read this in the presence of others, for it is secret". And there's a reason why we call little working nooks carols and why we still talk about chewing over new ideas. It's hard to imagine a time when reading and (basic, not necessarily creative) writing were separate skills, and that having the one did not necessarily imply having the other. We've changed a bit since printing happened.
- mogrim 13y ago> It's hard to imagine a time when reading and (basic, not necessarily creative) writing were separate skills, and that having the one did not necessarily imply having the other. We've changed a bit since printing happened. I'm guessing you don't have kids - it was quite an eye-opener for me when my eldest learnt to write before learning to read: I'd always assumed writing was harder than reading, and that both were intimately linked... They're definitely separate skills.
- stan_rogers 13y agoBeen there, done that, as folks say (and it was quite a while back — the kids have kids). That period in a child's life, though, is a short one, and most folks don't remember their own experience of the phenomenon (or much of anything else from that age, either) very well. (I'd bet that most of the people who use this site read relatively fluently before school age. Heck, most of us are so literate that we often mistake these here squiggles for "real" language when it is, at best, a rough guide for reconstructing what is a much more nuanced (and ephemeral) means of communicating.) "hard to imagine" and "hard to see if you're paying attention" are not interchangeable statements.