Like religious leaders in any period, the prophets functioned within a religious world that was broader and more diverse than a surface reading might suggest. In “The Book of Isaiah in the History of Israelite Religion,” Christopher B. Hays analyzes various religiohistorical aspects of the book, such as the role of writing and symbolic action; the supernatural images of the divine throne room; the book’s role in developing ideas about death and afterlife; its central role in the formulation of biblical monotheism, including its polemics against idols; and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

I open the book with the political struggle that took place between parties at COP24, over whether the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C should be noted or welcomed. This provides the context for exploring the IPCC as a central site in and producer of climate politics. In the chapter, I take the reader back to where this study began, with the question, who has the power to define climate change for collective response and what constitutes this power? The answer the book offers is the practice of writing. The actors, activities and forms of authority framework provides the analytical framework for exploring the asymmetries in power to effect how climate change is written. This approach has developed from interviews, observation and extensive data collection from IPCC documentation. The resulting book takes the reader on a journey into the intricate details of writing an assessment, the social order through which it is written and how climate change is known and acted upon through the process.

Manga communicates diverse qualities of sound through visual effects applied to writing. Voices in spoken dialogue, thoughts, and voiceovers are often represented through different type fonts or handwriting. This serves as a narrative tool to differentiate between text categories but also gives each one of them a specific resonance in the reader’s mind. Manga employs a multitude of usually handwritten mimetic words to express sounds and other sensations. Among the various graphic shapes these words assume is a semi-materialization of the written characters, which can undergo physical effects of the represented phenomenon and enter the spatial depth of the storyworld. The Japanese writing system heavily facilitates the visual characteristics of mimetics in manga, be it with the expressive use of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, the vowel-lengthening symbol, or the sonant mark.

Mastering the art of compelling communication can be a passport to success, as this introduction explains.

Diplomacy skills matter, and the widespread perception that anyone with common sense can be trusted with a diplomatic position, even without proper qualifications, is misguided and dangerous. Diplomacy is a serious business. The matters that diplomats deal with are too important to be left to amateurs. There are careers that do not require a new hire to possess any special skills on day one; diplomacy is not such a profession. Diplomats must have most basic skills so that they can hit the ground running. In fact, they are expected to have them before joining a diplomatic service, because most governments do not provide much substantive training to new officers. Although different career tracks–political, economic, consular, management and public diplomacy–require some specialized knowledge and abilities, most diplomatic skill sets are universal. This chapter covers the key aspects of diplomatic tradecraft, on which the rest of the book will elaborate and expound.

This study addresses the following questions: (1) What kind of unique phonological characteristics do heritage Japanese learners share? (2) Does L1 or L2 Japanese share these characteristics? (3) Do these characteristics correspond in oral and written production? (4) What could affect phonological transfer? Longitudinal/cross-sectional data to identify phonological transfer from English to heritage Japanese were collected from diary entries/compositions as well as oral and written tests by heritage Japanese learners growing up in Australia, compositions and written tests by Japanese monolinguals in Japan, and essay translations by L1 English speakers learning Japanese as an L2 in Australia. Possible phonological transfer features in heritage Japanese were examined to see if they occur in the L1 and L2. Correspondences between oral and written transfer features were also investigated, and quantitative analyses examined factors associated with phonological transfer. Findings indicate that phonological transfer is acquisitional, possibly influenced by literacy, the mental lexicon, and both sociocultural and individual factors.

Aztecs were brilliant scientists, writers, and artists. Medicine is an example of their scientific activities. They developed ideas about the causes of illness, practical and supernatural. Priests and priestesses were involved in curing, but Aztecs had an array of healers. The most commonly used term by Aztecs for a doctor – someone with specific and practical knowledge about healing – was “ticitl,” female and male. That Aztecs wrote is not widely recognized. They used writing to name people, titles, places, and deities. Not merely pictography, their writing is complex and developed from the late prehispanic period into the colonial period. Their books recorded calendars, history, tribute payments, and succession to rulerships. They also created a rich oral literature, often expressed through songs. Many were ancient, others composed in the early colonial period. Those that became written in alphabetized Nahuatl dealt with deities, temples, flowers, lords, war, sexuality, even conquest and Christian worship. Also great artists, they were influenced by the art of earlier peoples and the Mixteca-Puebla style and worked in several media: architecture; monumental and small-scale stone sculptures; books; precious stones and gold work; textiles; dough sculptures; and paper. This art expressed an official ideology as well as resistance to it.

How was Buridan’s thought shaped by its institutional setting and by pedagogical practice in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris? This essay argues that local circumstances are crucial not only for interpreting Buridan’s arguments, but also for understanding his larger contribution to the history of philosophy. Thus, we find that even working within the constraints of the arts curriculum, Buridan was always able to segue from established modes of instruction and prescribed topics to discuss philosophical problems of interest to him; in this he was no different from other arts masters of the period, and indeed, from university lecturers even today. But he also used his independence to embody, in ways he himself may not have fully understood, a new way of being a philosopher. Whereas a century earlier, Thomas Aquinas saw himself as a theologian and regarded philosophy as an activity proper to pagans such as Plato and Aristotle, Buridan sought to define what he was doing in contradistinction to theology, and on grounds we would now recognize as secular.

Chapter 1 discusses the role of target language production, or output, in the language learning process. Through examining hypotheses in the field of second language acquisition, as well as learner data, the authors consider why it is important for learners to have the opportunity to talk and write in the language they are learning. Strategies for how to structure these types of interactions and how to promote language production in learner-centered lessons are also included.

Chapter 13 addresses the sub-skills needed for successful second language literacy development. The relationship between literacy development and other second language skills, like vocabulary acquisition, are also presented. Learners’ prior experience with first language literacy skills is another factor for teachers to consider as they structure literacy-oriented goals and activities for their courses.

Focusing on the work of Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, and Cora Diamond, this chapter shows how twentieth-century academic philosophy in the United States can be characterized in part by an ongoing interest in and exploration of the essay as a philosophical form. In a pluralist spirit, these explorations approach the essay form as a place to rethink and remodel what philosophical argumentation might look like. Related to this work of reimagining, such writing addresses the proximity of philosophy to literature in two senses. First, it is attentive to the potentially literary, written character of philosophy. Second, it is characterized by an interest in taking up works of literature philosophically, as a continuation of philosophical analysis and as a means of immanent criticism precipitating questions about philosophical analysis itself. That the essay became a salient form for these philosophers reflects their methodological radicalism. Each asks questions about philosophy as a kind of writing, and, as Rorty noted, writing tends to come to the foreground in periods of disciplinary crisis or radicalism, when the implicit “stage-setting” of a discipline comes under question.

I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.