Clear and Simple as the Truth

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

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

In classic style, opinions stated clearly and distinctly are treated as if they can be verified by simple observation. The writer does not typically attempt to persuade by argument. The writer merely puts the reader in a position to see whatever is being presented and suggests that the reader will be able to verify it because the style treats whate

This is a psychological tactic of persuasion, founded upon our readiness to accept whatever has the same form as what we have already accepted. Consider roles, such as president, pope, professor, policeman. We accept new holders of these roles largely because they adopt an institutional form we have already accepted. The new president operates in k

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

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

Whether style is viewed as spiritual, fraudulent, or something in between, any concept of style that treats it as optional is inadequate not only to writing but to any human action. Nothing we do can be done “simply” and in no style, because style is something inherent in action, not something added to it. In this respect, style is like the typefac

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