Writing style

Our culture influences our writing. But what role does it really play? What does it change concretely? This article is about the scope of language we think with.

• ·         European, Asian or African writing style?

People can guess were we come from regarding our writing style. For instance, in the western languages, we use Latin alphabet whereas Russians use Cyrillic alphabet. If French is read from left to right, Arabic and Hebrew, on the contrary, are read from right to left. Symbols are really important, especially in Asian languages. Furthermore, American people put a lot of space between letters whereas French does not. There are various writing styles reflecting particular cultures.

As Alton L. Becker said: 

“Writing involves more than technology, and more than most would call language”.

Indeed, it is true that our culture has changed. It changed from orality to writing and printing to another form of orality with television (Walter Ong). Technology has brought a form of standardization in our writing style. We have different rules to respect according to the support we use (newspapers, blogs, novels, scripts for videos…). However, we have our own personality which is reflected in our style. Writing involves more than rules and technology, it highlights our culture and our human-being.

• ·         Language and graphocentrism

When we learn a new language, graphocentrism (an unconscious interpretative bias in which writing is privileged over speech) is very powerful, especially in France. If we are so bad at languages although we learn English for ages, it is partially because we do not speak enough. At school, we study grammar rules, irregular verbs and conjugation but we become very uncomfortable when it comes to speaking. However, when we use phonetic writing (like pinying with Chinese) it is not the same than when we write the right way (with symbols in this case). To learn a language, it is better to speak and to write it. We use both in everyday life, they are complementary and it permits to understand the culture behind the language.

When I started learning Chinese four years ago, I was very anxious about writing with symbols. I had never done that before and it was new and very different from using Latin letters. Finally, I was glad when we were shown how to use “pinying” (the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet). I did not have to know every symbols to remember words, I could write them in phonetics. However, my teacher was really mad about it and I did not understood why. I thought she was just annoyed because she had to teach us symbols and we weren’t very cooperative. Now I understand better why she reacted that way. By ignoring the right way to write words in Chinese with symbols, I was denying a huge part of this culture. I did not pay attention to the meanings of symbols. I thought that they were just too hard to remember. When I look back, we did the same thing with colonization when we forced people to give up their languages to adopt ours.

At the end, literacy involves more than reading and writing. It includes all the cultures behind it. Now I understand more the role my culture and my cultural identity play in my writing style thanks to my experiences with other languages as Chinese or even English (it is so hard for me to write 7 without the bar!).