Book Review: Orality and Literacy

The review presents Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy as an account of how writing transformed language and thought, rather than simply recording speech. Before literacy, communities faced strict limits on what people could remember and therefore relied on songs, repetition, ritual, and specialists who preserved knowledge by retelling it. Writing eased those memory constraints and enabled larger vocabularies, abstract concepts, lists, and more intricate sentence structures. The review contrasts oral speech’s rhythmic, additive phrasing and vivid actions with literate language’s abstract links and categories, using Homeric passages, biblical genealogies, and changes between oral and written versions of Greek drama to illustrate the differences.

Oral poetry, the review argues, was not usually memorized word for word. Poets improvised from familiar plots, metrical patterns, and stock phrases, adapting performances to their audiences. Repetition and convention were strengths because they helped preserve shared stories and cultural knowledge, not failures of originality. These poems could accommodate digressions and recurring themes, unlike tightly plotted forms such as detective stories, which depend on carefully fixed details. Oral epics also served practical purposes, transmitting knowledge about subjects such as warfare and governance, so their characters and themes tended to be broadly useful and archetypal. The larger point is that literacy reshaped not only how information was stored, but also how language, stories, and knowledge were organized.