Writing Isn't Just Speech Put Down

In a new book called the world on paper, he has tried to restate the literacy hypothesis in a way that acknowledges this critique and answers it. He believes that writing, in certain circumstances, does generate new modes of thought. It does so by creating problems of interpretation that are peculiar to written texts. Writing, he says, makes speech visible, and this leads readers into a new awareness of language. The notion of a word as a syntactic element in a sentence is not known to people who are not conversant with the written language.