No STEM Fruit Without The Writing Root

            Though often obscured by our more spectacular and lucrative technologies, writing is the Mother of all disciplines and the central tool in the invention of the technologies that followed it. Writing is the root that has empowered the STEM to develop - there would be no STEM fruit without the writing root. We may not have the personal jet packs or the flying cars predicted in The Jetson’s, but think about what has changed during the few thousand years since writing. These millennia represent only a few grains of sand in the hourglass of humanity during which we have evolved technologically from clay tablets to space stations. Writing has been the essential tool in these astonishing and rapid developments. Considering this, we would do well to balance our vigorous promotion and support for STEM with an equal measure of promotion and support for its protean root - writing.

            Our digital age can be seen as favoring image over text, but in cyberspace text still swirls around us in a maelstrom of meanings and links, many yet to be made. And behind the screen we see is the world of ever-evolving codes, most based on alphabetic literacy. Hypertext is a practical manifestation of the literary concept of intertextuality, and its facilitation of continual linking allows completely new and instructively unorthodox connections between texts offering unprecedented opportunities for new perspectives and discoveries. Twenty-six arbitrary shapes meant to represent sounds may not seem like a “technology” but the phonetic alphabet has been and continues to be one of the most powerful tools for shaping our world. 
          Because of its ubiquity we naturally become desensitized to its astonishing creative power, but this low-tech set of marks we learned to arrange in specific patterns on a surface represent thought as well as speech sounds. The alphabet has helped us invent new words, conceive ideas, tell our stories, keep records and develop increasingly complex ideas. Some ideas became materialized and mass produced in books, leading to more ideas and books and  eventually the birth of the artificial, if convenient, divisions of knowledge we call academic “disciplines.” And these disciplines continue to develop, discover and disseminate new information primarily with the irreplaceable technology of writing.   

            Most of us remember when we learned the alphabet to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” but how could we have known that the string of phonetic symbols we listed lyrically had helped us take our first steps towards those very stars? Without writing, we would likely still be living technologically primitive agrarian lives, relying on the slow and unreliable oral transmission of information. Without writing there would be no established law that materially and visibly fixed standards of civilized behavior, leaving us subject to the ugly unwritten laws of brute force and warlord whim – an historical pattern evident even today. And what’s worse, we’d have to endure all this with nothing to read for distraction.

             Today, the flow of information and resulting innovation is nearly constant. Sometimes it can be overwhelming but it’s exciting to live in an age so enriched by the complex creations of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. From our Smartphones, the World Wide Web and the International Space Station to nanotechnology, genomic sciences and 3-D printing, efforts in the STEM fields have yielded spectacular advances and they continue to change our lives radically. But, these astonishing fruits could never have occurred without the intensive use of the root technology of writing. The detailed development and accurate transmission of ideas requires the technology of writing so that specific details can be recorded precisely and accurately, and seed ideas can be explored and written into sprouting, ultimately bearing ripe and delightful fruit. 

            In the history of our species, writing is a relatively young technology but consider the accelerating technological explosion that followed it. Cuneiform, one of the earliest forms of writing, was developed in Sumer, today’s Iraq, over 3500 years ago so that merchants could keep track of their stock and tally sales by using an alphabet of abstract wedge-shaped marks made in tablets of clay. Today, barely four millennia later, we write digitally with a vast galaxy of new tools at our command – and for reasons that far surpass our original commercial purposes.

            Writing teachers would do well to reflect on how pedagogy and the act of composition might change as speech-to-text software programs increase in quality and accuracy. Such a change will necessitate gaining some basic knowledge of contemporary brain research and which areas of the brain are active during written composition compared with brain activity when we compose orally, as we have done for almost two million years. And, while it might be tempting to think that writing will become obsolete now that we can record speech digitally, we would be foolish to abandon the simple, free and reliable technology that helped us develop our ability to record sound.

            The Web is wonderful but it is expensive and vulnerable, dependent on a power grid subject to major interruptions through infrastructure decay, weather phenomena, cyber-attack and terrorism. In contrast, reading a physical book and writing by hand on paper can be achieved without electricity. Such old-school technologies are less hackable, less complex, more affordable - and far more stable. Even a wet book can be dried and read – try that with your Smartphone or laptop. Wisdom lies in a balance of old and new that includes a reliable backup.

            The teaching of writing must be more fully funded and vigorously promoted at all levels if we are serious about promoting STEM and the critical and close reading skills that are required in those fields. The good news is that, in the sciences, there has been an awakening to the importance of writing and the necessity of skilled writers to convey new discoveries accessibly to the broader public. This is especially crucial in times of rapid technological change. One program working towards this end is the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook whose mission is to train upcoming generations of scientists “to communicate more effectively with the public, public officials, the media, and others outside their own discipline.”

            Their inclusion of the public forum in their mission statement here is especially significant. It reminds us of what is often left out in discussions of literacy and education: civic engagement and participation in the democratic process. To be an informed and responsible participant in a complex democracy requires a high degree of critical literacy if we are to keep democracy alive. In an 1818 letter to Rev. George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson writes about the purposes of education that move beyond simple employment, and he notes the value of developing a clear understanding of our rights and responsibilities to our community as well as the expression and preservation of our own ideas in writing. And in Jefferson’s list of the necessary subjects for study the first two are writing and reading – the root from which the STEM has grown.