Abstract
Walter Wong's Orality and Literacy provides the reader, who by definition is a member of the literate world, with insights into the rich oral cultures that spawned the chirographic (writing) and the typographic (print) cultures that followed. In a world steeped in literacy for many centuries, interiorizing such insights is not an easy task. This may explain why many scholars, and some still today, work in a field of study known as "Oral literature": a "monstrous concept" and a "preposterous term" in Ong's opinion. Such an apparent oxymoron helps to point out how difficult it is for literates to grasp purely oral thought processes. Most human development according to Ong have been affected at great depth by the shift from orality to literacy.
