James Marriott's op-ed essay "Not reading or writing would be unthinkable" of 23 June 2025 is subtitled "The evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought". Key excerpts:

Writing is the most reliable (and often the most painful) method our species has devised of transforming half-formed notions and stray fancies into rigorous, logical thought. I cannot be the only opinion columnist to have discovered that ideas that sounded impressive when I was declaiming them in the pub have a habit of looking lame and illogical when transferred to that most stark and inhospitable of environments, the blank page. Ah… perhaps that’s not what I think, after all. Time to try again.

...

[Walter Ong] observed that oral cultures — which lack writing and thus communicate only through speech — must devote enormous cognitive energy to preserving knowledge. If you can’t write anything down, the only way to retain information is to remember it. Inevitably, this takes up vast intellectual resources and limits both the quantity and the quality of available thought. To preserve knowledge you must “think memorable thoughts”; if a thought is not memorable it will eventually disappear. Oral cultures thus rely on rhyme, metre, cliché formulations, strong emotion and outlandish characters to fix information in the minds of listeners. Such societies are good at producing epic poems of heroes and monsters, but they tend not to produce masterpieces of analytic philosophy.

Importantly, Ong argued, speech is ephemeral and imprecise. Spoken sentences cannot be refined and redrafted for maximum precision before being presented to an audience. And they disappear the moment they have been uttered. By contrast, the invention of writing allows authors to formulate complex and precise statements; readers can then reflect on them, interrogate them and add to them, building ever more complex and abstract ideas of their own.

Writing also favours logical argument over mere assertion — a written text allows us to flit back and forward as we read, to check if an argument is proceeding logically. In a book it looks weird if the author flatly states something to be true and then rushes off to an unconnected thought, though the habit is quite normal in conversation. The advent of literacy vastly expanded both the quality and quantity of thoughts available to our species.

... or in Toki Pona, perhaps, in summary:

jo sona li pali mute li pona suli
sitelen li pana wawa tawa jo sona

toki pona	loose translation
jo sona li pali mute li pona suli	getting knowledge is much work and is hugely important
sitelen li pana wawa tawa jo sona	symbols give power to getting knowledge

_{(cf Writing Rewards (2001-06-09), Better Writing (2003-05-16), Dangerous Literature (2006-03-03), Worth Writing Well (2016-08-17), ...) - ^z - 2025-07-01}