Squiggly lines

What does writ­ing look like to some­one who can­not read or write?

The image you see here was cre­at­ed by my three-year-old grand­son, Zeke. It is his attempt to make a book.

Zeke is read a lot of pic­ture books by his par­ents. More­over, his sev­en-year-old sister—in first grade—is excit­ed about learn­ing to read and write. So Zeke has a lot of expe­ri­ence with writ­ing, but has vir­tu­al­ly no com­pre­hen­sion of how to make sense of it. Even so, here he is attempt­ing to repli­cate writing—all those squig­gly lines.

For those of us who read, who have, more or less, mas­tered the art of decod­ing the sym­bols we refer to as the alpha­bet, I think it’s hard to grasp what a per­son sees when they can make no sense of writ­ing.  The clos­est  I have come to that—as an adult—occurred when I walked through the streets of Tokyo, pass­ing through a ver­i­ta­ble for­est of writ­ten Japan­ese of which I could make no sense what­so­ev­er. Still, I knew it was writ­ing and knew, too, it was my igno­rance of Japan­ese that pre­vent­ed me from reading.

But Zeke does­n’t grasp how our writ­ing works. Nonethe­less, he is repli­cat­ing what he sees. Those squig­gly lines.

But even as I write this, things are chang­ing for Zeke. His dad (my son) tells me Zeke rec­og­nizes a Z when he sees one. In oth­er words–so to speak–the end of our alpha­bet is the begin­ning of read­ing for him. I’ll miss the squiggles.