8 Quotes by Walter J. Ong

Learners are doers, not recipients.

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.

There is no way to write unless you read, and read a lot.

Print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion.

The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing engages social, economic, political, religious and other structures. These, however, are only indirect concerns of the present book, which treats rather the differences in ‘mentality’ between oral and writing cultures.

For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous.

Indeed, the diary demands, in a way, the maximum fictionalizing of the utterer and the addressee. Writing is always a kind of imitation talking, and in a diary I therefore am pretending that I am talking to myself.

Human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history, and at first only in certain groups. Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.