Kelly Cooke - Orality and Literacy

Orality and Literacy
Kelly Cooke
An interesting piece of comparing oral cultures and literate cultures is the way communications are interpreted. On page 99 of ‘Orality and Literacy’ Ong notes that, “The condition of words in a text is quite different from their condition in spoken discourse. Although they refer to sounds and are meaningless unless they can be related—externally or in the imagination—to the sounds or, more precisely, the phonemes they encode, written words are isolated from the fuller context in which spoken words come into being.” I didn’t originally consider the effect that exaggeration and connotation that come with oral communication would have on interpretation, but obviously it is important. Even in our own modern society, texts carry different meaning than if those same words were spoken. This means that we less accurately interpret the messages of others and are in some ways less disconnected than ever.

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