In the passage, “Writing is not natural” by Dylan B. Dryer, it states that unlike verbally speaking, writing is not natural. Dylan brings up the fact that when we are younger we develop speech pretty quickly compared to writing. We develop some speech on our own from listening to our parents talk, whereas when we write we have to be taught it. Writing is developed from arrays of symbols from the sounds that come from our mouths while speaking to one another. Speech is older than writing by thousands of years. Writing had to be culturally agreed on many years later than speech because of how unnatural it is. Muscle memory was also brought up in this passage because if you think about it we all have a dominant hand of writing that we use everyday, but when you try to use the other hand for writing it makes it very difficult to write. When you also look at typing, we all had to be taught how to type. Typing is just another way of writing words, and it’s just as unnatural as using a pen or pencil. Someone who claims themselves as being a bad writer is really just struggling to put what their words are saying into symbols that were socially agreed upon many years ago.
The passage, “Writing Is Not Natural” is an interesting idea. When reading the passage at first I was confused because I felt like almost everyone could read and write but we are all on different levels. It’s almost like we are taught that writing is a natural thing. There is writing everywhere we look, so it makes it seem like we are natural born writers. When the author of this passage Dylan B. Dryer, brought up the fact that writing is thousands of years younger than speech, it began to make me think. I began by thinking about the first time I learned how to talk and well to be honest I can’t remember learning how to talk, it feels like I have always been able to speak for as long as I can remember. When learning how to write I remember everything. I remember learning the alphabet, and learning how to use the alphabet to form words and words into sentences. As a younger boy, it was very difficult to learn how to write, but as you practice more it can feel like a natural thing. No matter what age, everyone can get better as a writer with practice, and there is no such thing as a natural born writer.
