Good writing is good thinking: how words can deepen activism

Writing and reading were once the preserve of the privileged, and the elite kept certain books and even certain words out of circulation, knowing their inherent power. Now, with the advent of the internet, writing is more democratised. But our attention spans are shorter than ever, making it hard work to keep an audience riveted. So how does one use language for social justice that is both clear and engrossing?

- By Mark Heywood

For most of human history, writing and reading have been an elite affair. For centuries, they were bound up with power and privilege. Only a few people were taught the art of word-fare, and access to the repositories of history and thought that were stored in writing was strictly controlled.

As usual, it took a combination of struggle by poor people and the growing needs of the capitalist economy for literate workers by the late 19th century - to break the rulers' monopolisation of the written word.

Once that happened, though, education facilitated mass literacy, which in turn opened the door for poor people to greater equality and upward mobility through the classes. Not many made it, but enough did to trick people like my father into believing that the key to a good life was getting an education and working hard, "pulling up by your boot straps", as he and others frame it.

If only it were that simple.

Nonetheless, while the expansion of public education eventually meant that most people learned to read, not everyone could write and be read; for the most part, the ability to publish was still tightly controlled by class and quality of education.

When there were breakthrough texts, such as Thomas Paine's 1791 The Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) or Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's 1848 Communist Manifesto, the huge readership they garnered demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the written word.

But these books were the exception. For the most part, the publishing of words remained tightly controlled mostly by men. It wasn't just political words they were afraid of. Words were also used to censor morals and shape culture, often protecting the dominant views of sex and sexuality.