Olivia Strittmatter - Oral and Literate Culture Similarities

April 13, 2020

From outside readings 4

While doing some outside research for some concepts from our second and third writing assignments I found this article that I thought was interesting and related to what we were discussing. The article seems like it was written by another student who used the username jkendell. It’s a very short article about the book we were reading, Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. The link will be at the bottom of this blog as always in case you want to read it for yourself.

The author of this article, jkendell, questions similarities in certain characteristics that were used in oral cultures and that are still used in literate cultures. They use examples such as formulas and mnemonic devices that are used to remember and memorize specific facts. They use the popular biology example that many students use to remember the order of biological taxonomy; in case anyone doesn’t know it is King Phillip Came Over For Good Spaghetti, and it stands for Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. The author also discusses how oral people describe the shapes of things by naming after objects rather than by using abstract names for them like circle, square, etc. Instead they relate the objects to others that are of similar shape. The last thing the author touched on was the use of somatics in oral cultures. By using gestures and body language to get their point across, instead of having a vast vocabulary.

I thought that this author’s view on Orality and Literacy was a different one than what I noticed in my other classmates discussion essays. This author used examples that we can all relate to, and made it a bit easier to grasp at the concepts that Ong was trying to convey to his readers. I thought that it related to our class really well since it was written about one of the books that we’ve read throughout the semester.I particularly enjoyed their relation of the mnemonic devices to biology because that made it a bit easier for me personally to get a better understanding of the points they were trying to make.


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