Writing: processes and purposes

It is not an exaggeration to claim that for almost all of us, writing is a rather artificial and minor medium for communication. With very few exceptions, we communicate through the spoken word, only resorting to writing when oral communication is impossible. Once we have, usually laboriously, learned how to write, even those of us employed in educational institutions exploit only a narrow range of writing purposes: writing a cheque, a formal and occasionally informal letter, a shopping list, a memo, completing a form. The writing is usually perfunctory, seldom extended, rarely imaginative and overwhelmingly utilitarian. Those who write imaginative prose or poetry for the love of it are sometimes seen as slightly eccentric creatures; those who produce such works for publication are set apart as ‘writers’ and ‘poets’, with all the nineteenth century connotations that these epithets inevitably trail.