EL336: DiRenzo informal reflection

Sometimes it's difficult to find peers who make me think of the daily reading's in a different way. What I am noticing is that the class agrees on the majority of the points each of us pose about the material. Chris discussed the fact that Cicero relied on Tiro to legitimize his work, the opposite train of thought Plato had, where his Socrates believed that writing was unintelligent due to the lack of interaction between the reader and the author. What Chris said brought me back to my own thoughts about the DiRenzo piece in relation to today's world. I mentioned how simply being a writer in today's world is usually not enough to gain a respectful, secure job. In Cicero and Tiro's time, Tiro was a rare find because he could scribe with such skill and speed. Writing for Cicero helped to solidify his points, which ensures the correctness of his words.

Jeremy's entry made me think of where the world would be today if writing's importance was never realized. We'd be incredibly unorganized in our daily lives, and the country would suffer from chaos, I'm sure. DiRenzo discusses how writing spread to all aspects of life-- the government could keep track of laws and court cases, calendars were widely used, and signs were everywhere. Where Plato once thought that the world had no use for writing, Cicero's generation was bombarded by writing out of necessity so much that if one were illiterate it was thought that they would be unable to survive.