The Shape of Writing

This working paper argues that writing is not inherently linear and that signed language does not need to imitate the line in order to be written. It introduces point, line, and plane as a way to see how writing systems organize language in space. Sutton SignWriting is presented as a strong case of plane-based writing because writers compose symbols spatially inside a written sign rather than merely submitting a sequence for later layout. The paper distinguishes human writing from machine encoding: software may need serialized text, but serialization does not prove that the writing system itself is linear. Plane-based signed writing requires stable symbol identity, compatible tools, processable encodings, corpora, datasets, and stewardship