What is Writing?

Is writing not but communication? Words formed together that converse?  Writing can be a direct message or abstract.  When thought is evoked as words are read, communication has happened.  Writing can be judged and discriminated, but the fact that thinking becomes of it-- solidifies that writing is merely communication.  Depth or not.  I like the idea that writing is delayed communication.  A relational conversation that continues to take place long after the author has passed.

According to Grave's, Rhetoric and Reality in the Process of Scientific Inquiry, writing is epistemic.  Can this be considered false?  Epistemic: of or relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.  The debate is who deciphers what is knowledge and what is not.  This is the argument.  It seems obvious to me that all writing comes from some form of knowledge, be it creative or strictly scientific.  Language, itself, is created by man.  Understood symbols used to communicate with each other.  This in itself is knowledge in the rawest form.  So, technically, yes, writing is epistemic.

Fisher's article, Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm, although unnecessarily wordy offers an interesting idea that writing could be summed up as a narrative paradigm.  He quotes Heidegger, "We are a conversation....conversation and its unity support our existence".  I am not entirely sure what is meant by this comment.  I take from it not that unity is an all accepting single outlook but that it is a part of a whole.  The argument, the agreement, the acceptance, the understanding...all these parts of communication is the unity.  All these parts are the conversation.  Writing is this conversation.

In terms of a narrative, there has been discussion about what makes one story better than another.  In rhetorical terms it seems to be based upon the audience and the text.  One text may fit better in one area than it may in another.  So what makes a narrative?  It obviously needs an author.  (Should that just be left unsaid)  A story, a description, a sequence, a chronology.  Is it a conversing, reflective, interpretive message?  Yes.  But is this writing in its entirety?  Does all writing narrate?  I am not sure if I can state an absolute opinion on this question.  My initial response, was to say that writing communicates.  But then too, doesn't the narrated story?  Yes.  Then, I thought well to write a list, a grocery list for example.  This isn't a story.  But the reader is 'narrated' and therefore responds.  So left then, a non-narrative is that which is not written by an author.  Well, what is written without a writer?