Orality and Literacy

By Walter J. Ong,

Book cover of Orality and Literacy

Book description

Walter J. Ong's classic work provides a fascinating insight into the social effects of oral, written, printed and electronic technologies, and their impact on philosophical, theological, scientific and literary thought.

This thirtieth anniversary edition - coinciding with Ong's centenary year - reproduces his best-known and most influential book in full…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Why read it?

2 authors picked Orality and Literacy as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book blew my mind when I first read it twenty years ago, and it still seems fresh when I revisit it now. 

Our common assumption about language is that it represents the world, plain and simple. However, Ong’s book colorfully captures how differently language was experienced in the oral world before the rise of literacy.

Hearers empathized with speakers and participated in the scenes their words evoked. There was an immersive and tangible sense of commonality that spread through the shared experience of sound, which comes from within one person’s body and enters another person’s body. Language knitted the…

Ong was a Jesuit priest and a professor of English literature with a profound knowledge of ancient cultures. He also had a bold thesis: the invention of written language performs a kind of “software rewrite” (NOT his phrase!) on human experience.

This book is his explanation of the differences between cultures dominated by the oral tradition and modern cultures dominated by the written word. Writing makes a whole set of things possible, like lists of arbitrary items, communication without seeing your audience, freeing ideas from reliance on fallible memory, and so serving abstract, analytic thought.

As well as making us…

From Tom's list on understanding the human mind.

Want books like Orality and Literacy?

Our community of 11,000+ authors has personally recommended 84 books like Orality and Literacy.

Browse books like Orality and Literacy

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in writing, creative writing, and folklore?

Writing 59 books
Creative Writing 43 books
Folklore 378 books