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

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

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

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

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

It is missing just one thing, namely, an explicit acknowledgment of its fundamental stand, and an acknowledgment that its fundamental stand is one of many alternatives. While their work is thorough, systematic, and theoretically sophisticated, and while they know that they are dealing with just one style, the work is misleading in its self-presenta

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