Wilton 1

Joshua Wilton
Megan Keaton
ENC 1101-26
11/14/16
What is Writing Rough Draft
In this paper I will be creating a theory of writing by answering the question what is
writing by looking at writings history and how writing is used.
Before we can answer the question what is writing, we have to look at how writing is
used. Writing has conventionally been used for a myriad of reasons, like telling a story,
organizing our thoughts, creating an emotional response with things like poetry, and much, much
more, but lets go deeper and ask why. How are these related? What do these various styles have
to do with one another? How do we create them? To be totally honest, they dont have much
connecting them, only really that they use written words. Each of these types of writing use
different processes to complete different functions, which lead me to believe that writing is more
than just its subject matter, that it isnt a physical thing like a poem or a book, but that writing is
a medium through which we communicate. One of the questions in the prompt for this essay asks
if writing is a process, and while it is more than its final form, I still wouldnt say that. As
mentioned earlier, the process used to create those various types of writing are very different and
their purposes are very different. To me, writing is deeper than that, an idea connecting all of
human experience through the immortal word, yet also simple, in its finality being nothing more
than a set of instructions on how to create a sound that others can understand. But why do we use
writing for these types of things? To answer this question, we need to take a look at how writing
first developed.
In ordered to understand how writing is used we need to know how it developed. As
previously mentioned, modern writing is used for such purposes as telling a story, organizing our
thoughts, creating an emotional response with things like poetry, and much, much more, but
writing wasnt always used for all of these. One could argue that the first, primitive form of

Wilton 2
writing is cave paintings, made by prehistoric humans. No words or letters are used, but it does
the same thing that conventional writing does; it keeps an unchanging historical account of
events that happened to these Neolithic humans. What separates something like historic cave art
from a history text book? In truth, the dividing factor ideas, communication, and a lot of time. A
long time ago I heard somebody say something that changed my perspective on writing forever.
They said that writing was basically just drawing sounds. That is what separates cave paintings
from modern writing. Instead of drawing pictures of men hunting mammoths, we draw the
sounds we would make to communicate that through another medium; speech. We developed
writing from drawing to make our ideas more understandable. So, are cave paintings, as
previously postulated, truly a form of writing? It is this authors opinion that, no, cave paintings
done by pre-historic humans could not be considered writing, because in ordered to be writing,
one must attempt to draw the sounds that would be made to communicate the same ideas. This is
what separates pictograph-type communication from pictograph-based writing, like
hieroglyphics or other image based writing systems.
In conclusion, writing is more than words on a page. Writing IS the page, it is the way we
communicate, the way we as mortal men become immortal. It is our words, our ideas, given
shape, like god speaking the world into existence.