Writing - written

Writing - the present participle and verbal noun of the irregular verb 'to write' is one of the 117 mis-spellings listed as 'Common difficulties' in the section on 'Spelling' within 'Writing' in UEfAP. The difficulty arises over whether the '-t-' should be doubled or not. This may be the result of confusion between the -ing participle and the -ed participle.

• The -ing participle of 'to write' (as used in such constructions as "I am writing ..." and "My writing hand is the right") and the verbal noun, e.g. "writing is hard" and "I can't stand his writing", are both spelled writing - with a single '-t-'. It is pronounced, like the base form, with the long '-i-', rhyming with 'sight', 'white' and the vowel of 'rhyme': IPA: /aɪ/. (The verbal noun can have a plural, as when publishers call the "definitive collection " of the central thinker in the nineteenth century Transcendentalist school The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
• The -ed participle of 'to write' (as used in such constructions as "I have written to her today" and "the written word carries more weight in courts of law than the spoken", is written with a double '-t--', written. It is pronounced with the short '-i-' of such words as 'it', 'this' and 'thin', and the first vowel of 'little' and 'kitten': IPA: /ɪ/.

If you have difficulty with these, remember the pronunciation:
    writing sounds like write: both have one '-t-';
    written sounds like 'kitten', 'mitten', smitten' and 'bitten': all have double '-t-'.    

• This simple picture can be muddied by the existence of writ, which has several different significations. It may be confusing because it has the same short '-i-' as 'written' (its plural is homophonous with 'Ritz'), but is spelled with a single '-t-'.
  • It was an archaic form of the -ed participle of 'to write', and has been used sometimes by poets and other writers aiming for an archaic effect, as for example Edward Fitzgerald wrote of the moving finger

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

and the gravestone of Keats bears, as he asked, the simple line ""Here lies one whose name was writ in water." (The phrase was used earlier by Beaumont and Fletcher's Phylaster (1620: v 57): "All your better deedes shall be in water writ; but this in marble", and by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Henry VIII (1623, IV ii 46):

"Mens euill manners liue in Brasse, their Vertues

We write in Water." (Both quotations cited byOED.)

• • • The phrase writ large, originally used with a literal sense of 'having large letters [in the manuscript]', but now a journalistic cliché applied figuratively to mean 'prominently', 'easy to see'. It can be subverted to such phrases as 'writ small'.
  • Writ can be a noun
    • in general discourse it has the sense of 'something written', particularly since the Reformation, to refer to the Bible in the phrases Holy Writ and Sacred Writ
    • In law, a writ is a specific kind of document: one where a court issues an order, sometimes a prohibition. (In earlier times, it was an order issued in writing by the royal court, for example to summon members of Parliament to a session. This gives rise to a meaning close to that of 'jurisdiction., as in 'within the King's writ' and '[X]'s writ runs over ...' (i.e. X has authority for ...').)

The verb 'to write' belongs to Quirk's Class 4 C a.