Literacy is important not only as a means of access to new information and as an extension of memory. Rather, it is argued that writing is a means to the awareness of the implicit properties of language. This awareness is expressed through new concepts for referring to what is said, what is meant by it, what it implies, of what it is composed, and the like. Writing achieves this effect through distancing the thoughts of the writer from the fixed, objective form it takes when written down. The effect on the reader, correspondingly, is equally distanced from the writer with the result that reading is less like hearing a speaker that like over-hearing. I describe this effect by saying that writing puts language within quotation marks.