The Art of War

For this assignment I chose The Art of War by Sun Tzu to showcase how a text can convey meaning using a variety of different structural and typographical decisions.

In Chinese, the text is written out in a stream of short, segmented sections of text, most of which don't stretch longer than four lines. At first I thought this could equate to larger sections of text in English, but the size of each translated section remains roughly equivalent. Because the original text was first written on a collection of flattened out bamboo, it's difficult to discern what, if any, intentions the author had in structuring the information the way that he did - it could have just been a convention of writing under those conditions. Regardless, what we have in the modern, translated edition is a numbered list of short paragraphs, each covering a unique war-related topic. Though it's uncertain if the original text prefaced each paragraph with a number (I can't read Chinese), the decision to number them in the English translation creates an unavoidable spatial affect: it makes the text feel authoritative, as though this list is a continuation of the ten commandments handed down by Moses.

In addition to the formatting of the text, its linear qualities carry a similar affect. Each sentence is written as a statement of fact, without any delineations explaining or defending them. The reader is the pupil, and the text the master, and at no point is the reader allowed a space for argument.

These linear and spatial elements combine to give the impression that the author (or authors) intended to minimize the importance of radial reading. Essentially, this text is not intended to promote further study, nor does it prescribe to a literary complexity that would require supplementary information.