ShmoopTube

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In this lesson, we're tackling one of the most important human inventions of

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all time... the Snuggie. What, it's amazing. Okay, fine, we're actually tackling [guy puts on a Snuggie]

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writing, but we're doing it in a Snuggie. Without writing, the complex civilization [person teaches in Snuggie]

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we know and love today could not exist. Writing gave us the power to accurately

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preserve the past, to exchange information with people we couldn't [hand writes]

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directly speak to, and to create a common body of knowledge that [benefits of writing demonstrated]

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was larger than any single individual's brain. Without writing there'd be no

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Canterbury Tales, no car manuals, and certainly no super-angry Twitter Wars. [a world without writing]

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Actually, that part sounds okay. But seriously, we read every day, from cereal

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boxes, to directions on how to make a pizza, to math textbooks. So yep, pretty [people read]

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important. And now, for the story of how when and where writing systems first

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emerged. Unfortunately, it's complicated. Well [book opens]

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there wasn't just some dude who was struck by lightning and ran back to his

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village shouting, "Guys, we should carve some letters into clay tablets--it'll be [guy has lightning-fueled epiphany]

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awesome." Yeah... Well, like most technology, the invention of writing was a process

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that involved lots of people over a long period of time all working to [people write through the ages]

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communicate in better ways. But it wasn't isolated in one area. Nope--writing was

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developing in different places all over the world. Some might be wondering why [global map of writing]

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writing needed to be invented at all. Isn't it just a natural extension of

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talking? Well, yes and no. When we see a word on a page, we immediately see what

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the word refers to in life. It's like we see the word tiger and we imagine a tiger, [writing symbolism demonstrated]

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right? But written language is symbolic. In other words, it uses symbols that, when

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combined in different combinations, represent or refer to something in the

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real world. So somebody somewhere had to come up with the idea of a series of

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symbols that represented spoken language. No pressure or anything. And yes, it took [person draws in sand]

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some serious leaps in thought to get all of humanity on the writing bandwagon. [people pushed onto bandwagon]

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Introducing new things is never easy, which would explain why the world dress

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code still isn't the Snuggie. [everyone wears a Snuggie]

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