if the student is writing a twelve-page research paper about ethanol and its importance as an energy source of the future, would she write with an audience of elementary students in mind? This would be unlikely.
This is a great point. It gets you thinking about who you will be writing for, which helps you determine the tone of your paper.
It is perhaps helpful to approach the audience of a research paper in the same way one would when preparing for an oral presentation.
This is a great tip, I didn't think about it like that. This gives me a good starting point
it is important for the student to articulate an audience that falls somewhere in between.
Make sure you know who your target audience is
In 213 BCE, people added a second picture to words that sounded the same; the first picture indicated the sound, and the second indicated the word's meaning
This seems like a nice adjustment to help people understand the words better.
he Ancient Chinese writing system grew to include thousands of characters.
Grew from about 10-60 characters to thousands of characters
They hoped their ancestors would crack the bones using hot rods. The patterns created by the cracks would help the kings predict the future.
This is a pretty interesting idea!
ten to sixty characters, were inscribed on bone.
I was reading from the linked earliest Chinese writings and it says they used turtle shells that have been fired.
For hundreds of years, people tried to decipher the message on the Rosetta Stone but were unable to crack the code. Finally, in 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion, who could read both Greek and Coptic,
Wow, I wonder how Champollion was able to read Greek and Coptic. Why could nobody else decipher the rosetta stone? Were they not able to learn how to read in these languages or did they not know that it was written in Greek and Coptic?
About 200 CE, demotic was replaced by Coptic ,
"Only a few Coptic liturgical manuscripts survived into the twenty-first century. Most did not survive because they had been written on parchment and endured poor preservation methods."
Like cuneiform, hieroglyphs were often written from left to right but could also be written from right to left and top to bottom
This is interesting, I wonder how you know which way to read it if it can be written in so many different ways.
called hieroglyphs
"Words and ideas were represented using pictorial icons called ideograms (or logograms, when referring specifically to words and not ideas). Sounds were expressed with symbolic icons called phonograms. In some cases, scribes needed to use special characters to clarify the meaning of the written text. These determinatives allowed the intended meaning of the word or concept to be properly understood."
This system, called hieroglyphics, had about seven hundred signs called hieroglyphs and was used to record spoken language .
"According to legend, Thoth , the Egyptian god of knowledge, created the system to enable the Egyptian people to enhance their wisdom by recording their history. However, the sun god Ra warned that this would weaken the memories of the Egyptian people and undermine their oral traditions ."
Cuneiform spread throughout the Middle East and was used to record fifteen languages, i
Wow they used this system to create 15 different languages?!
reed
According to google dictionary a reed is a tall, slender-leaved plant of the grass family, which grows in water or on marshy ground
Sumerian scribes were temple officials who used this first writing system, which consisted of pictures that represented objects.
I think this is very interesting, it does make sense that without having a language, they would communicate by drawing pictures of what they were talking about.
Historians believe the ancient Sumerians most likely created the first writing system around 4000-3500 BCE
"The earliest writing form was not phonetic. There was no relationship between the symbols used and the speech sounds of the language. Rather, Sumerian writing started out as a pictographic system, consisting of simplified drawings of animals and objects"
Most historians agree that the Ancient Sumerians developed the first early writing system in 4000-3000 BCE
That is a long time ago, kind of crazy to think about!
comprised a civilization
Being able to communicate among each other makes it a civilization?
A writing system is a set of symbols used to represent a spoken language.
I've always wondered how these symbols, we call the alphabet, represent a spoken language. How did someone come up with the different sounds that each symbol should make? And how does putting all of these symbols together make words that we can understand and communicate with eachother?