TYPES OF WRITING

1. Expository

- one of the most common types of writing.

- explain a concept and impart information from themselves to a wider audience.

- not include author's opinion, but focuses on facts about a topic like for example
statistics or other evidence.

EXAMPLE:

1. Textbooks

2. How-to articles.

3. Recipes.

4. News stories (not editorials or op- eds)

5. Business, technical, or scientific writing.

2. Descriptive

- often found in fiction, though it can make an appearance in nonfiction as well.

EXAMPLE:

Memoirs

First-hand accounts of events

Travel guide.

- paints a picture in words of a person, place, or thing for their audience.

- author’s might employ metaphor and other literary devices in order to describe the
authors impressions via their five senses ( hear, smell, see, taste, or touch)

-not convince the reader but just describe things.

EXAMPLE:

1. Poetry

2. Journal / diary writing

3. Descriptions of Nature

4. Fictional novels or plays.

3. Persuasive
- main style of writing you will use in academic papers.

- trying to convince the audience of a position or belief.

- contains author's opinions and biases, as well as justification and reasons given by the
author as evidence of the correctness of their position.

* Argumentative Essays should be PERSUASIVE.

EXAMPLE:

1. Cover Letters

2. Op-eds and Editorial newspaper articles.

3. Reviews of Items.

4. Letters of Complaint

5. Advertisements

6. Letters of recommendation.

4. Narrative

- used in almost every longer piece of writing (fiction or non-fiction)

- not just trying to impart information but they are trying to construct and communicate
a story, but it also has complete characters, conflict, and settings.

EXAMPLE:

1. Oral Histories
2. Novels/ Novellas
3. Poetry (especially epic sagas or poems)
4. Short Stories
5. Anecdotes

Source:
https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/aboutwriting/chapter/types-of-writing-
styles/?
fbclid=IwAR2GuzBXO4ysh8XysciKmIMsQnQfDQDtcL5iWgxOidoGdA1ADoxj-jn6iUE
 HISTORY OF WRITING

DATE PLACE OF ORIGIN DESCRIPTION

5,500 Mesopotamia (Iraq) Sometime during this same period,
years ago the symbols – which were initially
read from top to bottom – came to
be read from left to right in
horizontal lines (vertical alignments
were kept for more traditional
pronouncements). In keeping with
this, the symbols were also
realigned, rotated 90 degrees anti-
clockwise.
2340 BC Mesopotamia (Iraq) Sumer fell to the armies of Sargon,
King of the Akkadians, a northern
Semitic people who had previously
co-existed with the Sumerians. By
this time, cuneiform had, for several
centuries, been used bilingually to
write Akkadian too.
3250 BC. Egypt New discoveries have pushed back
the date for writing in Egypt close to
that of Mesopotamia. Discoveries of
large-scale incised ceremonial scenes
at the rock art site of El-Khawy in
Egypt date to around 3250 BC. They
show features similar to early
hieroglyphic forms. Some of these
rock-carved signs are nearly half a
metre in height.
3200 BC Egypt From 3200 BC onwards Egyptian
onwards hieroglyphs appeared on small ivory
tablets used as labels for grave goods
in the tomb of the pre-dynastic King
Scorpion at Abydos and on ceremonial
surfaces used for grinding cosmetics,
such as the Narmer Palette.

Writing in ink using reed brushes and

pens is first found in Egypt. This ink
writing came to be known in Greek
as hieratic (‘priestly’ script), whilst the
carved and painted letters we see on
monuments are called hieroglyphs
(‘sacred carvings’).

Carved and written characters are

close in date. This suggests that from
 the earliest times, writing in Egypt
had two functions: one was
ceremonial, a display script (carved),
the other was in the service of royal
and temple administrations (written).

Within four centuries of the finds in

King Scorpion’s tomb, hieroglyphs and
Hieratic (a cursive writing system
used for Ancient Egyptian) developed
a full range of characters. This
included:

o 24 uni-consonantal symbols
(an ‘alphabet’ containing various
consonants only)
o phonetic components
representing combinations of
sounds
o determinative signs (signs with
no phonetic value, used only to
determine which of several
alternative meanings for a word is
meant in a particular context).

It is from this Egyptian writing that

an alphabet would first evolve,
sometime from 1850 BC onwards.

1300–1050 China The earliest examples of writing in

BC China were found near present-day
Anyang, on a tributary of the Yellow
River, 500km south of Beijing. Here,
the kings of the late Shang dynasty
(1300–1050 BC) had founded their
capital and carried out divination
rituals using animal bones.

For centuries, fragments of bones had

been found by farmers and sold for
use in Chinese medicine as ‘dragon
bones’. It was not until 1899 that
politician and scholar Wang Yirong
(1845–1900) recognised characters
carved into the surface of some of
these bones and realised their
significance. As the earliest written
records of Chinese civilization found to
date, these inscriptions extended
 Chinese historical and linguistic
knowledge by several centuries.

These 'oracle' bones (the shoulder

blades of oxen and turtle plastrons)
record questions that were posed to
the royal ancestors about topics as
diverse as crop rotation, warfare,
childbirth and even toothache. To
date, nearly 150,000 examples of
such bones have been found,
containing over 4,500 different
symbols, many of which can be
identified as the ancestors of Chinese
characters still in use today.
But Shang readers would not be able
to read present-day Chinese and the
majority of the characters on the
oracle bones remain undeciphered.
Even the characters that can be
identified have evolved considerably in
terms of their function and form. Not
only did pictographic characters
become gradually more abstract, but
as the written vocabulary expanded,
more compound forms developed.

Basic components were shared

between characters to reflect
similarities in pronunciation or
meaning. In this way, since ancient
times, Chinese characters have been
able to represent both concepts and
the sounds of spoken language to
varying degrees.

The bones show a fully developed

writing system which must have been
formed many years – perhaps
centuries – earlier, although earlier
materials have not yet been
discovered and may not have
survived.
 900 BC Mesoamerica Recent discoveries have pushed the
evidence for writing in this area –
which runs from southern Mexico to
Costa Rica – close to 900 BC.

The discoveries have also widened the

range of cultures and languages that
we know used writing from
the Maya, Mixtecs and Aztecs to
include the
earlier Olmecs and Zapotecs.

There were two types of writing

systems in pre-colonial Mesoamerica:

1. Open systems were means of

recording texts that were not
linked to the grammatical and
sound structures of specific
languages. They functioned as
mnemonic devices, guiding
readers through the narratives
of texts without relying on the
linguistic background of the
given audience. These were
common among the Aztecs and
other Mexica communities of
central Mexico.
2. Closed systems were tied to
the sound and grammatical
structures of specific
languages. These were
targeted at particular linguistic
communities and functioned
similarly to the writing we know
today. Examples of these
closed systems can be found
among the Maya.

The position of scribe was of high

status. Maya artists were often
younger sons of the royal family. The
Keepers of the Holy Books, the
highest scribal office, acted as
librarians, historians, genealogists,
tribute recorders, marriage arrangers,
masters of ceremonies, and
astronomers.

Just four Maya books survive from the

pre-colonial period and fewer than 20
from the entire region. These codices
are painted onto deer skin and tree
bark, the writing surface coated (as
were many of the buildings) with a
polished lime paste or gesso.
 7000 BC Indus River Valley In the Indus River valley of Pakistan
and northwest India, symbols have
been found on objects that may be
writing. The society that used these
symbols was the culmination of a
historical settlement in the Indus
region that goes back to at least 7000
BC. A high urban culture flourished for
700 years, between 2600 and 1900
BC, at which point the cities declined.

Although we have about 5,000 known

inscribed artefacts and the longest
inscription consists of 26 symbols,
most are just three or four signs long.

The 400 unique symbols that have

been identified are too low in number
for a viable logographic word-based
writing system. This number of
characters is similar to that found in
pre-dynastic Egyptian hieroglyphs and
early Sumerian script. Scholars have
therefore suggested that like these
two systems, the Indus River Valley
script may contain a mixture of
logographic and syllabic components.
Unidentifie Rapa Nui (Easter Around two dozen wooden tablets
d Island, Polynesia) inscribed with glyphs were discovered
on Rapa Nui in the 19th
century. Rongorongo, a term the
Rapa Nui themselves applied to these
objects, was interpreted by
missionaries at that time to mean
‘lines incised for chanting out’. But
knowledge of how to use the tablets
had already been lost by that time.

The characters reflect human, animal

and plant motifs. There are 120
elementary (un-joined) glyphs, which
have been used to write texts as long
as 2,320 characters and as short as
just two.

Whether rongorongo is purely a
mnemonic device or a system of
 logographic and syllabic symbols
remains an open question, as does its
claim to be a unique sixth point of
origin for a writing system.

Source:

https://www.bl.uk/history-of-writing/articles/where-did-writing-
begin#:~:text=Scholars%20generally%20agree%20that%20the,Southern
%20Mesopotamia)%20and%20other%20languages.

EVOLUTION OF WRITING

The direct antecedent of the Mesopotamian script was a recording device

consisting of clay tokens of multiple shapes. The tokens, used as counters to keep track
of goods, were the earliest code for transmitting information. Each token shape was
semantic, referring to a particular unit of merchandise.

For example, a cone and a sphere stood respectively for a small and a large
measure of grain, and ovoids represented jars of oil. Some accountants impressed
tokens on the surface of the envelope before enclosing them inside, so that the shape
and number of counters held inside could be verified at all times. These markings were
the first signs of writing.

Around 3200 BC, clay tablets bearing impressions of tokens replaced the
envelopes filled with tokens. Picturesographs—signs representing tokens traced with
a stylus rather than impressed—appeared about 3100 BC.

Mesopotamian writing began with the creation of incised pictographs and

impressed numerals, a combination of signs that initiated the semantic division between
item counted and number. Sumerian was mostly a monosyllabic language, the
logograms had a syllabic value.