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Scholars generally agree that the earliest form of writing appeared almost 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). Early pictorial signs were gradually substituted by a complex system of characters representing the sounds of Sumerian (the language of Sumer in Southern Mesopotamia) and other languages.
The original Sumerian writing system derives from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. … About 2600 BC, cuneiform began to represent syllables of the Sumerian language. Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers.
Humans lived for tens of thousands of years with language, and thus with tales about the past, but without writing. Oral history is still important in all parts of the world, and successful transmission of stories over many generations suggests that people without writing can have a sophisticated historical sense.
Although spoken language is believed to have developed tens of thousands of years ago, the written word emerged much later, as hunter-gatherers developed more permanent agrarian societies. … This script is now known as cuneiform, our first written language.
People developed writing to communicate across time and space, carrying it with them as they traded, migrated and conquered. From its first uses for counting and naming things and communicating beyond the grave, humans have altered and enriched writing to reflect their complicated needs and desires.
As it spread into different areas of life, it has been adopted and embedded in law, the marketplace, learning, religion, storytelling and politics – each use reshaping the forms and nature of the written artefacts that are produced.
Writing is the primary basis upon which one’s work, learning, and intellect will be judged—in college, in the work place and in the community. Writing equips us with communication and thinking skills. Writing expresses who we are as people. Writing makes our thinking and learning visible and permanent.
The Stone Age
In the Paleolithic period (roughly 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 B.C.), early humans lived in caves or simple huts or tepees and were hunters and gatherers. They used basic stone and bone tools, as well as crude stone axes, for hunting birds and wild animals.
They are written as though they are collections of information. In fact, history is NOT a “collection of facts about the past.” History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.
Ideographic languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are more flexible in their writing direction. They are generally written left-to-right, or vertically top-to-bottom (with the vertical lines proceeding from right to left). However, they are occasionally written right to left.
The Vedas are older than the New Testament, but only parts of the Old Testament.
In fact, literacy has a long history. The first written communication dates all the way back to 3500 B.C., when only a small amount of people learned to read and write.
Sumerian language, language isolate and the oldest written language in existence. First attested about 3100 bce in southern Mesopotamia, it flourished during the 3rd millennium bce.
Writing shapes culture and forms society. This is a duty for us. People believe the things they read, and so it becomes necessary that we put down our ideas, whether in a blog, or a letter to the editor of the local news paper, or even in the high school magazine.
Technology has changed the way we perceive, interpret, and even write literature, by creating the ability for everyone to write, through social networks, reviews, and blogging, and it has been for the better. Technology has, and will continue to influence literature in a multitude of different ways.
The three main purposes for writing are to persuade, inform, and entertain.
Many students feel writing takes too long. For some, writing is a very laborious task because there are so many sub-components which need to be pulled together. For others, the reason lies in some processing difficulties, such as dyslexia or dysgraphia. … There are many reasons students avoid writing.
ANYTHING. Putting words on the page is the hardest part, and if you begin with putting your thoughts into words, your writing will progressively flow and become natural. … Brainstorming, planning and outlining are important factors in getting a start to any piece of writing.