The basics

Steps above Ugh . . .

Writing is simply the art of converting sounds into coded visual images. The quality of the act of writing and the act of reading that writing, is largely a measure of the writer’s and reader’s understanding of the code used to construct the glyphs and their sequences needed to depict an individual sound in the form of a visual image. In this particular form of human endeavour, levels of excellence in all instances of written narrative are decided, defined and adjudicated by the readers. Readers see the sequence of visual images, silently convert those images to imagined sound sequences in their heads and from those sounds form the sensory experiences that the writer wished to convey. The reader is thus stimulated and captivated by the imagined and/or deduced thought sequences accrued by the author in the form of a series of silent sounds in his head.

The evolution of writing has to have stemmed from a desire to record the utterances of the wise so that ensuing generations might benefit from the cumulative lessons learned by their antecedents. The ability to record sound directly without going through sets of man made writing codes should logically have seen the demise of such written records but writing continues to be one of our most effective and most used means of communication. The explanation for this apparent anomaly lies in the recurring editorial nature of written communiques. Writing offers thinkers the means of progressive intellectual honing. Comprehension tends to be an evolutionary rather than a spontaneous process.

Thinking and comprehension aids . . .

Thus, a writer’s thought in its embryonic stage can be written, once written it can be assessed. On finding incompletion, hazy comprehension or faulty deduction, the writer can amend and re-write his thought repeatedly until he gets it right. And so the tiny acorn of a thought embarks on the long and arduous growth journey to emerge as a mighty oak of erudition.

No code, just image . . .

When the written images are not coded, there are no sound creations, silent or otherwise. No codes to interpret should mean less taxing cerebral energy, more intellectual freedom and greater academic output. But this unconstrained and expressive means of communication is adjudicated outside the realms of defined logic. Leonardo da Vinci’s work is great because it is the work of Leonardo. Art work and its appreciation tends to lie with the aficionados, the intellectual worth remains esoteric and contribution to the progression of universal enlightenment remains somewhat stagnant when compared with the voluminous writings that have shaped mankind's progression.

The boring bits . . .

Hypnotic stupefaction results from repeated exposure to coded sounds and sights that contain no cerebral stimulus. The brain must continuously have something to work on, interpretive challenges, knowledge assimilation and consolidation of the many symmetric and asymmetric confluences of sensual receptors provide the intellect with its much needed workload. Without such stimuli the brain simply lapses into a state of stupor.