Assignment #3: To Live Is to Write?

The ability to express oneself, one’s feelings, emotions, thoughts and needs, is one of the biggest gifts we have and we, living in free societies where people can express plenary, always wanted to do that direct through talking to each other or indirect in written form. I would say that communication is one of the groundbreaking needs of every human being. But writing in this view is and can do more. Thinking about the phenomenon “writing” I got the impression that writing has different dimensions today. Going back in history and time I think the basic functions of writing were and still are communication, spreading knowledge, retaining knowledge and information for posterity or preserving thoughts for oneself, while the basic function of writing still is communication. We link writing with the possibility of spreading information to a large group of people without adulterating them. Think about newspapers or the bible that send information and messages to millions of people everyday.

I really like to write. I have my own website where I host my own diary and all people that have access to that page can read my thoughts. I asked myself why I am doing this. And while thinking about that question I recognized that sometimes it is much easier to express one’s feeling, thoughts, emotions or needs by writing them down instead of voicing them. And if you haven’t understood the message you can read it over and over again.

When people started to write things down (in hieroglyphs, characters or symbols), they first wanted to communicate easy messages. But soon man realized that writing can do more. Writing can change the world, can evoke conflicts and wars, can entertain, can influence the life and people dramatically and can broaden ones horizon drastically when one has access to further literature. Along with the ability to write it must be said that we also need the ability to read and understand what is written. So writing also means to express (sometimes) complex information in a systematized way people can decode.

I think the ability to write is the cornerstone of every society within the world and a cornerstone of the human being. We can write down laws and regulations, can spread and conserve knowledge over generations and compare information from different parts of the world. To summarize the phenomenon “writing” I would like to present keywords I link with the verb to write: communication, entertainment, knowledge, information, culture, history, literature, art, music, language, personal development.