ABSTRACT
Although it may seem a truism to say it, speech and writing are different, and this is the underlying assumption in this book. Writing shares many characteristics with a mountain: permanent, clearly delineated and readily available for inspection. We see the marks relevant to our language’s system of orthography (the letters of an alphabet, the symbols of an ideographic script) and can return to them repeatedly if need be, finding the words they represent each time exactly as they were on the page during our last reading. Our understanding of the words may change, as, say, we grow older; or our opinion of their import may alter-we may, for example, change our opinion of the ending of Great Expectations or come to understand a line of poetry differently-but the existence of written text permits us to meet identical words again and again on different occasions.
