Writing at first would seem to present enormous, nearly-insurmountable cognitive hurdles. We typically think of it as an invention to facilitate communication, but so much about it resists the easy transmission of thought and sensibility made possible by millions of years of human evolution. We evolved to communicate face to face and side by side; gesture accompanies word like remoras clinging to the body of a shark. The flicker of eyelids, the rhythm of the breath, even the odor and heat of the body contributes to the conversation. Writing does more than simply strip all this away; it presents the reader with a new set of challenges: decoding and computation, assembly and algorithm.

Many of the problems of composition are irreducibly problems of writing itself. When schoolchildren struggle to learn the craft of the personal essay or the short story, they’re addressing the same questions faced by the scribes of ancient Sumer who turned the rude numerancy of gouges in clay into a net for catching language.

We face those challenges in large part by embodying writing not as computation but craft, in bringing it back into the human lifeworld of sense and corporeality. We remember tacitly that letters too are born of the natural world—a world that often presents us with partial, restricted, and reduced evidence out of which to read its patterns and processes. The blink of a particular blossom in the forest; the fragmentary line of tracks in the snow; the ragged rhythm that certain species of game birds make in their flocks when making ready for migratory flight—these broken melodies are reading’s precursors.

“When I’ve taught writing,” Richard Sennett writes in his magisterial The Craftsman, “I’ve asked my students to rewrite the printed instructions that accompany new software. Perfectly accurate, these nefarious publications are often unintelligible. They take dead denotation to an extreme. Not only do engineer-writers leave out ‘dumb things’ that ‘everyone knows’; they repress simile, metaphor, and adverbial color. The act of unpacking what’s buried in the vault of tacit knowledge can make use of these imaginative tools. By invoking the signals birds send by twittering or bees by dancing, the person rewriting software instructions can make comprehensible what hypertext does and how economically it should be used.”