A Better Pencil-Baron Part 2

This book talked a lot about how writing has evolved and ways in which people communicate. I think it is crazy how much things have changed from writing on clay tablets, to paper and pencil/ink, to typewriters, to modern day computers and technology. I would like to compare and contrast this book to the Orality and Literacy book that we read in the beginning because that book talked a lot more about oral language and communication but A Better Pencil was all about different forms of written communication. I learned in Orality and Literature that language was substantially more oral than written which I believe was definitely the case during the time of the clay forms of writing. People were a lot more use to communicating orally through hierarchies in communities so they came up with clay to write on only when it was extremely necessary. These people did not have unlimited amounts of paper or even no paper at all to write on so clay or drawing on walls was their best option. I think this is very interesting because in our world today that would make things so complicated especially for communication within states and countries. How would a state law get passed around on a slab of clay for everyone to be informed about? This is why I believe so many things with both oral and written language have evolved for the better because we now have really great communication compared to what they had long ago. 

A Better Pencil - Chapter 1, 3, 5

This was an interesting read in my opinion and my favorite part was chapter 5. This chapter is titled Writing on Clay and it is about different writing technologies including the early days when they used clay tablets and stylists, writing with paper and ink, typewriters, and now modern day computers that have advanced word processors such as Microsoft Word. I thought it was really interesting because I had never really thought about people actually using clay to write on and keep documents on. They used clay tablets, even the size of credit cards at first, for keeping records of inventory and sales.  Then people finally started keeping laws, contracts, and other legal texts on larger tablets of clay about the size of the paper we use today. Writing technologies have evolved immensely since writing on clay, there were a lot of technical difficulties with the clay method such as it did not come ready to use and you had to create a paper shaped tablet of clay and let it harden a little bit each time you needed to produce a written work. While with the paper we have today there is pretty much unlimited supply of it and it is ready to write on which makes the paper and pen/pencil method a lot faster and more efficient. Also carving letters into clay takes a lot more time because it is harder to make legible and there are shards of clay that rise and have to be removed without smudging the content that has been written. One benefit though that I thought was interesting about clay is that they could reuse the clay tablets all the time. When people did not need a certain document anymore they would just get the clay tablet wet a little bit and smooth out the surface so they could rewrite more important things and reuse it. I think this was a way more environmental friendly writing technology because we throw out so much paper every day and it is a waste.

One benefit of using ink and paper though is you can write endless amounts on the front and back of multiple pieces of paper and just staple the pages together, with clay you only had one or two sides of the tablet to write on and that’s all you get. The clay tablets did not allow a person to write a lot of information because there was such limited space. I do believe that the most modern form of writing is the best and most efficient way especially after reading these chapters. One reason I believe this is that typing on a keyboard is very fast after learning how to in school and it is the most legible and professional way of creating a document/any piece of work. Without this modern writing technology we would not have legible documented laws in place and clay tablets especially would not be a good long term record-keeping method.

Response to Second Half of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

When I finished the last bit of this story I realized this was a pretty good story and that I could probably read it again in the future. I think Achebe is a good author and I would like to research other stories that he has written and maybe read those as well. I also got to read essays and author’s responses to this book called Things Fall Apart because I purchased the critical edition of the book. There were lots of positive responses to Achebe’s book but there were also negative responses. One section that I read after I was through reading the story was an essay called Problems of Gender and History in the Teaching of Things Fall Apart. This was about student responses to the book who have read it for class and lots of students told their teachers that this book has a lot of sexism and they think it should be taken out of the curriculum. I understand why the students find Okonkwo the main character sexist but they should think more about the time period that this story is supposed to take place in. At that time there were specific gender roles and things that females simply did not participate in. Times have definitely changed and I think all that matters is that it is different now for the better.

Also there was another essay I read that I would like to respond to, it relates a lot to the last one. This one was called Character and Society in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and it talked most about the main character, Okonkwo as well. First of all this essay points out that the author did a great job of accomplishing complex artistry in this story which I do agree with. Second, it points out that there are definitely divided opinions about the main character such as whether he was a product of the values and norms of his society or was not a product of his society. This essay also says something that is related to the gender and history essay; it says “Where his society is noted for its discrete blending of the masculine and feminine principles Okonkwo is openly contemptuous of all things feminine.” I think this is interesting because Okonkwo did have three wives and I do not remember him being that sexist but maybe I just do not remember those parts of the story. I think it was a good story and even though these issues could become a bigger problem and criticism of the book in the future, I think it is a common issue and sometimes it is what makes these stories interesting. For example, how different their society was from ours today was interesting to me and the sexism is one of the differences.  

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (First half)

In my opinion Things Fall Apart was a pretty cool story, it really brought me into the African culture and was entertaining to read. It was a little bit hard to keep track of all the characters especially since they all had crazy names that I could barely pronounce. The story was about a village called Umuofia in Africa and there were many characters, the main character being a man named Okonkwo. The story also talks a lot about his father mostly before it gives information about Okonkwo. His father was named Unoka and he was not a very successful man, he was very poor with a wife and kids who barely got enough to eat. The story basically described Unoka as a failure, the only thing he really loved to do and was good at was playing the flute, he would sit on his "mud recliner" and play the flute sometimes all day. He was heavily in debt and owed almost all of his neighbors money and it remained this way until the day he died. Okonkwo on the other hand, did not take after his father too much and was very successful. He was a wealthy farmer who owned two barns which were full of yams and he had three wives. Also unlike his father, he won fame throughout the village at a young age because of a wrestling match that he agreed to against a great wrestler named Amalinze. Amalinze was known as the greatest wrestler and then when Okonkwo decided to compete against him, Okonkwo won the wrestling battle and gained the "greatest wrestler" title from Amalinze.

There were lots of conflicts in the village of Umuofia throughout the story; one of them was another village threatening Umuofia which almost started a war between the two. It was a village called Mbaino who committed a crime against Umuofia. A powerful orator who was always chosen to speak to Umuofia on important occasions informed the village what Mbaino had done. His name was Ogbuefi Ezeugo and he said to the people “Those sons of wild animals have dared to murder a daughter of Umuofia!” When the village people heard this, they were very angered and together they came up with an ultimatum. They asked Mbaino to choose between war or the offer of a young man and a virgin as compensation. Before I found out what the other village’s decision was, the story first went on to talk about how feared Umuofia was by all of its neighbor villages and also that they had the best medicine known as “agadinwayi” which means old woman. I thought it was interesting how they named medicine after old woman, maybe because older people need the medicine the most? Anyway so the Mbaine people wanted to avoid war with the Umuofia village as much as possible so Okonkwo was sent to retrieve a young man and a virgin from the Mbaine village. When he came back to Umuofia with the two young people, they both then belonged to the Umuofia village. The young virgin was made Ogbuefi’s wife and the young man whose name was Ikemefuna was put under Okonkwo’s supervision and lived in his household for about three years. This village was full of great people in my opinion and I bet after living with Okonkwo, Ikemefuna was more successful than he would have ever been living in the Mbaine village. 

Orality and Literacy second half:

I enjoyed reading this book, Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. It was a tiny bit boring for my taste but it had some good information about today's different forms of language and communication. In the second half he talks a lot about the writing aspect of language and how it is definitely a technology.
Also he touches on the form of writing that is printed and that print is a very important form that both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression. I think Ong makes some very interesting points throughout his book which is what makes it a good read. The first thing that caught my attention/interest what when he says "writing establishes what has been called 'context-free' language or 'autonomous' discourse." He explains this to be discourse that cannot be directly questioned or contested as oral speech can be because written discourse has been detached from its author. I believe what he means in this part of the book is that information that is in writing such as in textbooks or anything really, is always believed by the reader to be true. Readers do not stop to think who the author is and whether they could be wrong or not, they just assume that everything they are reading is true and cannot be false because it has been published in writing. I think this was a really good point that he made because until now I have pretty much thought the same way about all my textbooks for example that I have read for school.

Another thing is when he considers writing as a technology and explains that this is because it calls for the use of many tools and other equipment. The tools and equipment include pens, pencils, ink, paper, etc.  He says that “technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.” I am not exactly sure what Ong might mean by this statement but I am going to guess that he means technology is not just a tool that we use for school or jobs but technology teaches us and helps us to understand things and has expanded the language realm.

Chelsea Taylor

To be honest, reading the first half of the book called Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong was pretty boring in my opinion. I think the topic had me disinterested within the first couple chapters and the wording was boring and confusing at times. There were too many run-on sentences that I thought were unnecessary and could have been a lot less complicated. Even though it was boring to me I could say it was some good information about the difference and significance between oral and written communication. Also there is the form of communication that is non oral nor written, such as facial expressions, body language and gestures, and other ways of using our senses to communicate.
Something new that I learned from reading the first half of this book was the word grapholect. I learned that it is a “transdialect language formed by deep commitment to writing.” I believe that this is a term for communication that is done on the computer or in any online situation. Another thing I thought was really interesting was that the book explained that language is far more oral than it is written. To prove this, the book provided a fact that said out of many thousands of languages in the world; only about 106 of these languages have ever been committed to writing. I think this is very interesting because in order to learn languages I would think the visual aspect of writing the language is needed. Overall I did think this was a boring reading but I am glad that I learned a few new things from it which definitely makes up for that.