Clear and Simple as the Truth

You are making an inference, for example, when you think that someone “looks disappointed.” The fact that the “disappointment” is an inference rather than something perceptible often goes unnoticed. We have to remind ourselves that a common phrase such as “You could see disappointment all over his face” is not literally true. The paradox is that th

The radical of presentation is a scene that cognitive scientists call “joint attention.” Joint attention is a familiar and common scene, one we experience routinely. In joint attention, people in one place are attending to one thing; they know they are all attending to it, and they know that by attending to it they are engaged with one another. The

Truth is pure, eternal, not contingent. Jefferson’s sentence hangs there like a star. It is true that his sentence is a response to a particular occasion, but he chooses to meet that occasion with something that does not depend upon occasion. What he expresses is grounded in something that was always there and that will always abide: we are endowed

Most writing in schools and colleges is a perversion of practical style: the student pretends that he is writing a memorandum. He pretends that he knows more than the reader, that the reader needs this information, and that his job is to impart that information in a way that is easy for the reader to parse. This pretense is supposed to be practice

To convince another competent person of what is being said does not involve appeals to authority or traditional wisdom or anything other than a simple presentation of the order of reason leading to that conclusion, so that someone else can also reach it independently.

This sort of thing happens every day. When a high school geometry student proves t

In our experience, blackbirds are quite different from aspirations, but grammatically, “blackbirds” and “aspirations” belong to the same category. Nouns like confidence, religion, nation, aspiration, and money already prompt us to structure complicated concepts as things. In the structured version, they are all things that you can recognize. Single

Recall from the Essay that to present something to someone is not merely to call attention to it, as in, “Look, there is a blackbird.” Rather, to present something is to present what you want your companion to perceive. You expect your companion to be able to perceive what you are presenting once it is pointed out, as in, “That blackbird on the tre

An actual scene is unclassic when the writer wants or needs something from the reader. The classic writer never explicitly argues for the reader’s agreement, never overtly solicits a reader’s vote or ostensibly engages in salesmanship at any level. He does not write to convince his reader of anything or to lead his reader to any action; he does not

Since Auerbach’s measure of stylistic maturity values writing to the extent that it penetrates through local and individual human purpose to historicist truth, he naturally discounts the individual purposes of writers as impediments to the representation of truth. The more a writer includes and the less he selects according to his own purpose, the