Three propositions serve as the foundation of Formal SignWriting development: 1) the importance of real literacy, 2) the utility of formal structures, 3) the benefits of living forward.

1. Organizing Principles
of Formal SignWriting
by Stephen E Slevinski Jr
the Center for Sutton Movement Writing
January 12
th
, 2018

2.  Three propositions serve as the foundation of Formal
SignWriting development.
1) the importance of real literacy
2) the utility of formal structures
3) the benefits of living forward.
Organizing Principles
of Formal SignWriting

3. 1) The importance of real literacy
Literacy is the ability to read and write.

4. How to Read a Book
“This is a book for readers and for those who wish to
become readers… it is for those whose main purpose
in reading books is to gain increased understanding.”
“By ‘readers’ we mean people who are still accustomed,
as almost every literate and intelligent person used to be, to
gain a large share of their information about and their
understanding of the world from the written word.
Not all of it, of course; even in the days before radio and
television, a certain amount of information and understanding
was acquired through the spoken word and through
observation. But for intelligent and curious people that
was never enough. They knew that they had to read…”

5. How to Read a Book
The first level of reading
Elementary Reading
The passing from nonliteracy to beginning literacy
Recognize letters and words
“What does the sentence say?”

6. How to Read a Book
The second level of reading
Inspectional Reading
Getting the most out of a book within a given time
Systematic skimming and pre-reading
“What is the book about?”
“What is the structure of the book?”
“What are its parts?”

7. How to Read a Book
The third level of reading
Analytical Reading
Getting the most out of a book without a time limit
Thorough and complete reading that is intensely active:
asking many organized questions
Analytical reading is preeminently for
the sake of understanding, not simply
for information or entertainment.

8. How to Read a Book
The fourth level of reading
Syntopical Reading
Comparative reading of many books, placing them in relation
to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve
Construct an analysis of the subject that
may not be in any of the books
The most rewarding of all reading activities

9. Writing the Natural Way
“The most intimate facet of learning is self-design, giving
us a sense of identity in time and space. We are
designers, active agents of thought and language, not
passive receivers. The act of writing is one of the most
intensely creative acts we can engage in.”
“The creative process, then, is the ongoing oscillation between
the mind’s ability to form a hazy big picture and then to
sequence the details to clarify and ‘hold’ it, then to redesign,
and to clarify further. This collaboration between the Sign
and Design mind has led to stupendous human creative acts.
Two brains are indeed better than one!”

10. Writing the Natural Way
Sign Mind Design Mind
Right Brain
Connections
Whole
Patterns
Complex images
Nonliteral
Left Brain
Sequence
Parts
Logic
Reason
Critic

11. Writing the Natural Way
Clustering: Accessing the Design Mind
Clustering is a nonlinear brainstorming
process akin to free association

12. Writing the Natural Way
Mental Shift
Start writing once you experience a sudden
sense of what you are going to write about.
We learn together and we play together. One at a time.
Drop by drop. We discover language in a playful way,
learning as we go. All together, merging into streams,
merging into rivers. Until the world is covered with
sign as an ocean of language.
SignPuddle

13. Writing Without Teachers
“The most effective way I know to improve your writing is to do
free writing exercises regularly. At least three times a week.
They are sometimes called ‘automatic writing’, ‘babbling’, or
‘jabbering’ exercises. The idea is simply to write for ten
minutes (later on, perhaps fifteen or twenty).”
“After you have done three or four exercises that are more or
less ‘on’ what your subject turns out to be, you will have piles of
rubble, you will will probably also have a lot of words, phrases,
and sentences that seem important. Pick out these good bits.
Strip away the rubble. Now use as much careful thought and
editorial discrimination as possible in order to see what they add
up to: decide how much you believe them, how true they are, in
what senses they are true; arrange them somehow so they make
sense, and write new and connecting parts when necessary.”

14. Writing Without Teachers
Productive
Editorial
Only at the end will you know what you want to say.
Expect to end somewhere different from where you started.
Write before you know your meaning.
Never stop to look back or to cross out.

15. 2) The utility of formal structures
The visible shape of something.
Formal
Conventions
Freeform
Construction
Formal
Order
Formal
Language

16. Formal Conventions
The exact form of each symbol is structured,
standardized, and highly featural.
Valerie Sutton created a collection of visually
iconic symbols that exists in a layered hierarchy
This formal writing is called Block Printing. It
is used in education, publishing, and is the
basis of the computerized model.
By contrast, handwriting can be used informally
with fewer features and less detail. However,
this can create notes that are sketchy compared
to the clarity of formal Block Printing.

17. Freeform Construction
SignWriting is an unconventional script
because it is not written sequentially. Rather
than a string of letters, each sign is written as
a 2-dimensional cluster of symbols.
The freeform construction of the signs does not
impose any rules or restrictions on the writer.
Because of this, any sign of any sign language
can be written in any style without limitation.

18. Formal Order
The 11th Century Song Chinese developed the movable
type printing press. Each piece of type contained a single
character mostly equivalent to a word. Great block houses
developed with hundreds of thousand of type pieces each.
The Chinese logographic system is open-ended. New
words require new type. Each house created their own
specialized logograms. Organizing the numerous type
pieces became a problem. It was easy to understand how
to organize the basic type, but new logograms didn’t have a
definite place within the established order. The practice
developed to attach slips of paper to unusual logograms
with a sequential list of more standard writing. This way,
each piece of type was easy to organize and it was
possible to learn the ordering for the new logograms.

19. Formal Order
SignWriting has developed a similar
mechanism. Since we can not use a
2-dimensional sign spelling for sorting,
we create a separate list of ordered
symbols. The order of the symbols is
subjective and based on a particular
theory of sorting. The most productive
is Valerie Sutton’s theory of the
SignSpelling Sequence.

20. Formal Language
According to Wikipedia, "In mathematics, computer
science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set
of strings of symbols that may be constrained by
rules that are specific to it."
Formal SignWriting defines a formal language for the
signed languages of the world. Any sign of any sign
language can be written as either a string of ASCII
characters or a string of Unicode characters.

21. Formal Language
C ⊂ L (G)
* C = the corpus of international text
* ⊂ = the subset of
* L = the Formal SignWriting language
* G = the formal grammar of Formal SignWriting
G = (N,Σ,P,S)
* N = the set of non-terminal tokens
* Σ = the set of terminal tokens
* P = the set of production rules
* S = the start token
N = {S,T,A,B}
* S = start token
* T = term
* A = ordered prefix
* B = signbox
Σ = {a,b,l,m,r,w,s,p,n}
* a = prefix marker
* b = signbox marker
* l = left lane marker
* m = middle lane marker
* r = right lane marker
* w = writing symbol
* s = sequential symbol
* p = punctuation symbol
* n = number token
Word production rules
* P1: S → T
* P2: S → B
* P3: S → p
* P4: T → AB
* P5: A → Aw
* P6: A → As
* P7: A → aw
* P8: A → as
* P9: B → Bwnn
* P10: B → bnn
* P11: B → lnn
* P12: B → mnn
* P13: B → rnn
Sentence production rules
* P14: S → ST
* P15: S → SB
* P16: S → Sp

22. 3) The benefits of living forward
Hindsight, validation, and hope
Learn from the past
Apply in the present
Work towards the future

23. Learn from the past
Model Echo
Before the work, look
into the past to see
what was done before.
After the work, look
into the past to see
where the same things
were done.

24. Apply in the present
Empowerment Cooperation
Provide information
for others to apply
and provide tools for
others to use.
Work with others to help
them achieve their goals
or something that neither
could have achieved
without the other.

25. Works towards the future
Progress Generations
The works isn’t done
yet, but we’re getting
better all the time.
The real goals and
benefits will be achieved
long after we are gone.

26. The literary tradition in
Western Civilization
3,000 years of reading and writing.
A brief digression…

27. The Great Books of Western Civilization
60 Volume Set
Vol. 1: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, vol. 1
Vol. 2: The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, vol. 2
Vol. 3: Homer
Vol. 4: Aeschylus. Sophocles. Euripides. Aristophanes
Vol. 5: Herodotus. Thucydides
Vol. 6: Plato
Vol. 7: Aristotle I
Vol. 8: Aristotle II
Vol. 9: Hippocrates. Galen
Vol. 10: Euclid. Archimedes. Nicomachus
Vol. 11: Lucretius. Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius. Plotinus
Vol. 12: Virgil
Vol. 13: Plutarch
Vol. 14: Tacitus
Vol. 15: Ptolemy. Copernicus. Kepler

28. The Great Books of Western Civilization
60 Volume Set
Vol. 16: Augustine
Vol. 17: Aquinas I
Vol. 18: Aquinas II
Vol. 19: Dante. Chaucer
Vol. 20: Calvin
Vol. 21: Machiavelli. Hobbes
Vol. 22: Rabelais
Vol. 23: Erasmus. Montaigne
Vol. 24: Shakespeare I
Vol. 25: Shakespeare II
Vol. 26: Gilbert. Galileo. Harvey
Vol. 27: Cervantes
Vol. 28: Bacon. Descartes. Spinoza
Vol. 29: Milton
Vol. 30: Pascal

29. The Great Books of Western Civilization
60 Volume Set
Vol. 31: Molière. Racine
Vol. 32: Newton. Huygens
Vol. 33: Locke. Berkeley. Hume
Vol. 34: Swift. Voltaire. Diderot
Vol. 35: Montesquieu. Rousseau
Vol. 36: Adam Smith
Vol. 37: Gibbon I
Vol. 38: Gibbon II
Vol. 39: Kant
Vol. 40: American State Papers. Federalist. J.S. Mill
Vol. 41: Boswell
Vol. 42: Lavoisier. Faraday
Vol. 43: Hegel. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche
Vol. 44: Tocqueville
Vol. 45: Goethe. Balzac

30. The Great Books of Western Civilization
60 Volume Set
Vol. 46: Austen. George Eliot
Vol. 47: Dickens
Vol. 48: Melville. Twain
Vol. 49: Darwin
Vol. 50: Marx. Engels
Vol. 51: Tolstoy
Vol. 52: Dostoevsky. Ibsen
Vol. 53: William James
Vol. 54: Freud
Vol. 55: 20th Century Philosophy and Religion
Vol. 56: 20th Century Natural Science
Vol. 57: 20th Century Social Science I
Vol. 58: 20th Century Social Science II
Vol. 59: 20th Century Imaginative Literature I
Vol. 60: 20th Century Imaginative Literature II

31. Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy and Cosmology, Beauty,
Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom
and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty,
Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family,
Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness,
History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity,
Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and
Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine,
Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature,
Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion,
Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle,
Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity,
Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other,
Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State,
Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular,
Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
The Great Books of Western Civilization
102 Great Ideas

32. The literary tradition with
Sign Language
All great endeavors must have a start.
Future generations will be blessed
because of what we do today.

33. by Stephen E Slevinski Jr
slevinski@signwriting.org
Organizing Principles
of Formal SignWriting