Writing Studies: The Curriculum of the Future
An Initiative of the Endangered Alphabets Project
It’s a curious feature of the landscape of higher education that while many, even most institutions research and teach about individual cultures and their language and literature (Chinese, for example, or French), and most also research and teach spoken language in a holistic way as a human attribute or activity, nobody researches and teaches writing as a similar human activity.
Anthropologists often touch on writing as it is used by a specific culture. Educational psychologists study how we learn to read and write. Literature specialists examine that very specific application of writing. Linguists tend to treat writing as applied linguistics, focusing on issues like orthography and, until quite recently, overwhelmingly concentrating on alphabetic writing. There is still no general agreement as to what is or is not encompassed by what some scholars call grapholinguistics. In the middle of all these (and other) traditional disciplines, though, is a black hole where the serious study of writing ought to exist, a blind spot so absolute that almost nobody thinks there is anything to see in that direction.
One identifying quality of an understudied field is the impression that there is nothing there to study. Another is the assumption that whatever is worth studying is already being studied. But in fact, these are symptoms of the blind spot: until we know what is there, we can’t tell whether it is important.
As the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project, I’ve spent 16 years studying writing, and especially script loss—a topic that is as absent from the general radar as endangered languages were before the 1990s. My research into the world’s minority scripts quickly became more than an exercise in identifying writing systems. The sheer variety of forms of writing, writing practices, writing mythologies, and the physical and psychological relationships between the writer, their writing tools, their writing surfaces, their readers and their community made it clear that these were issues of vital importance, and deserved to be examined from as many angles as spoken language.
For example:
- The neuroscience of writing is, by one leading researcher’s admission, “in its infancy.” The same researcher estimated that the act of writing by hand “may be the most complex activity of which the human brain is capable.”
- From a historical perspective, we know very little about the conditions that enable writing to develop and spread, or how an oral culture is transformed by the introduction of writing.
- There’s not much about the different ways in which different cultures use (or don’t use) capitalization and punctuation, and whether it influences rhythm or meaning, or one through the other.
- From a political point of view, we should know more about how traditional writing practices were affected by colonialism, and how writing has changed (or not) in post-colonial societies.
- The role of writing in divination and magic is a subject in itself.
- The distinction between writing and art is a false distinction, as all writing has a graphic identity, so how do the two interact?
- From a history-of-technology perspective, we have very little documentation of how the spread of printing led to the endangerment of minority scripts, and almost no idea how the identity and practice of writing will be affected by the rise of artificial intelligence, or what ethical considerations apply when digitizing a minority script, especially a sacred one.
- We don’t even have a developed science of how and why letters are shaped the way they are, and why even the same script may vary from community to community.
As I write this in later 2025, research on writing is still being conducted by isolated scholars across numerous disciplines, and very few people are teaching about it comprehensively. The diverse work on all aspects of writing deserves to be recognized, archived, gathered, and used as a basis for teaching materials for a field that as yet has no agreed name. I call it Writing Studies.
As such, this small but growing band is creating what I think of as the Curriculum of the Future. There may not be programs or even courses in Writing Studies, but soon enough there surely will be, and my colleagues and I are taking it on ourselves to create the research foundations and the teaching resources against that day.
On World Endangered Writing Day, I offer you the beginnings of the Curriculum of the Future of Writing Studies. Some of the day’s live events (which will make their way onto our YouTube channel) definitely offer thoughtful discussion material for seminars of the future, but in addition I’d like to offer you this video of our Asemics Summit.
Asemic writing is fascinating because it is a paradox. “Asemic” means “without meaning,” but if writing has no meaning, is it writing? And if it isn’t writing, what is it? What may seem like a fringe art form actually takes us to the heart of writing itself.
After the discussion was over, one of our gang ran it through ChatGPT to see what AI makes of asemicism, or at least of our conversation about it. I’m offering that document as well, not because AI knows what it is talking about, but because it boils the conversation down to individual nuggets, each of which can be the starting-point for fruitful discussion.
We offer all this to you, to make use of in the near future.
