In her recent article in the New York Times Magazine, “Listening to Braille,” Rachel Aviv quotes a writing excerpt from a sixteen-year-old blind student whose literacy has developed through aural/oral means, without the benefit of braille. This single excerpt is meant to stand as damning evidence of the failure of oral-based literacy:

He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his bed sleeping mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.

I wouldn’t suggest that this is excellent writing. But by the same token, I wouldn’t — as the author of the article and apparently Doug and Diana Brent, the two researchers at the University of Calgary who are studying the effects of aural-based learning, suggest — construe this passage as damning evidence of the dangers of aural/oral-based education without the benefit of braille or other visual/haptic alphabets. Here is how Aviv describes it:

The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only readers as disorganized, “as if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table.” The beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, “It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought that we value in a literate society.”

Yes, the writing passage above is missing some basic features of standard writing, such as clear sentence boundaries and standard punctuation. However, many fully educated writers of standard English fail to understand when it is appropriate to use a comma versus a period in discursive prose — prose that is increasingly influenced by the technologies of texting and email, where urgency and ease trump thoughtful composition. Furthermore, as any instructor of writing knows, it can be difficult to give feedback on a piece of student writing without knowing a) where the student is in the composition process, and b) what the assignment is. With the example above, neither of these criteria are known. Nor is it known if the student was given an opportunity to revise — or even review — his or her writing before submitting it. What class or discipline produced this piece of writing? And how might this student’s education be characterized more generally? What specific writing instruction does a student receive in oral/aural-based education for the blind? None of this information is provided by the article.

Just as the contextual parameters used to produce this writing are lacking, so too are the paratextual cues for the reader undeveloped. How are we meant to read this piece of writing? In what genre does it fall? The Brents complain that the passage above is exemplary in its failure to adhere to the criterion of “organized sequence” valued in typical argumentative writing. While it is true that most prose is valued for its sequential development, it strikes me that the passage above is not an example of argumentative writing but rather of imaginative “creative” writing. And while sequence and organization are of course important to the genres of fiction and poetry, they often operate under different principles. One way in which creative works develop is by returning to charged symbols whose meaning expand and develop each time they are revisited. In the passage above, I find the symbolic development of the bomb and the mask — particularly the way they seem to swap functions — to be intriguingly surreal and poetic. (Also note, in support of the passage’s surreality, the reference to sleep.)

I’m not saying that the writer above is a James Joyce or Alice Notley in embryo (though the the passage does suggest the correspondence between literary structures and orality; poetry is often more sound than sense). What I am saying is that we understand and evaluate writing depending on genre conventions. If a student submitted an experimental poem for a sociology assignment, it would seem very wrong. If a student submitted a sociology paper to fulfill a creative assignment, it would also seem an inappropriate (though perhaps quite brilliant) response to the assignment. And so it seems unfair and unscientific to judge the blind student’s writing without knowing the particular assignment, context, and means governing the production of this writing. (To point to another way in which context informs reception, I ask you to consider the case of text messaging. “LOL C U L8R” is an entirely appropriate SMS communication, but wildly inappropriate in a job application. Context determines discourse and, to a degree, sense.)

Indeed, read in a different light, we might find certain felicities in the blind student’s writing —in its resemblance to certain strains of surreal poetic language with strong oral qualities— as well as failings. It all depends on knowing or being to create a convincing context for the writing—the context in which the writing was produced, and the context in which it is read (which can of course vary, depending on reader and occasion).

More generally, Aviv makes a provocative (if reactionary) argument about the ways that technological advance potentially renders education less effective — the ways in which it may lead to the atrophy or regression of certain literacies and knowledges. But the arbitrary and under-contextualized use of evidence in the article — the interpretation of a single student’s writing as damning evidence, without any context — weakens Aviv’s argument and potentially misrepresents the effects of aural/oral education and literacies. I am certainly not resistant to the idea that Braille may still be a necessary educational technology for the blind. Written language is, after all, still the most powerful technology for molding consciousness (cf. Walter Ong; also Robert Logan’s The Alphabet Effect). And I would be sad to see very effective educational technologies like the book, the pen and paper, the argumentative essay, etc., compromised by the current ethos of techno-consumerism, in which the new object necessarily represents advance over the old. But I am also attracted to the ways that oral/aural languages persist (in poetry, for example) and structure alternative modes of writing — and, thus alternative consciousnesses. Rather than fear the decline of written communication at the expense of the aural, why not examine the new ways that aural / alphabetic / visual languages productively overlap, particularly in new media writing.