ABSTRACT
Writing is among the greatest inventions inhuman history, perhaps the greatest invention, since it made history possible. Yet it is a skill most writers take for granted. We learn it at school, building on the alphabet or (if we live in China or Japan) the Chinese characters. As adults we seldom stop to think about the mental-cum-physical process that turns our thoughts into symbols on a piece of paper or on a video screen, or bytes of
information in a computer disc. Few of us have any clear recollection of how we learned to write.
