Conceptualizing the Written Word

In this article, the author offers some personal reflections on the origins and continued development of his thinking about the nature of writing and the relationship between writing and cognition. He recounts how his early efforts to understand the unique effects of writing on cognition, which he claimed were different from the effects of speech on cognition, culminated in his controversial theory of “autonomous texts”: namely, that whereas in speech one listens primarily for a speaker's intentions (i.e., what is meant), writing elicits a form of understanding that seeks a more literal interpretation of sentence meaning (i.e., what is actually said). The author acknowledges the merit of several criticisms of his early claims, but defends his core thesis that writing both enables and encourages writers and readers to say and think things differently than does speech; writing entails a unique mode of understanding that divorces form from meaning. He revises his earlier contention that literacy represents a form of cultural progress toward a more cautious view of writing as an instrument of increasing cultural specialization. Finally, the author outlines several unresolved issues that serve to focus his continued efforts at understanding how writing affects cognition.