ABSTRACT
Writing is a means of communicating between people across time and space. Writing can serve to mutually orient attention, align thoughts, coordinate actions, and transact business among people who are not physically copresent as well as among those who are. These social accomplishments depend on the text inducing appropriate meanings in the minds of the receivers, so literacy activates psychological mechanisms by which we make meaning and align ourselves to the communications of others. These psychological operations activated by literate practices may induce pleasures in themselves and evoke attention to our own inner processes of feeling and thought, such that we may find reading and thinking to be ends in themselves. Nonetheless, reading and writing are deeply social processes, connecting people's thoughts, perceptions, experiences, and projects into wider collectivities of organized action and belief.
