What makes a sentence clear? The answer lies in the words we choose and the way we order words in sentences. We read sentences more rapidly and understand their contents clearly when sentences have several characteristics: active voice, a clear-cut actor as the subject and an action verb. Writers should also ensure that subjects and verbs occur close together in sentences and that readers encounter subjects and verbs relatively close to the beginnings of sentences.

How to remember your new skills, and what to do with them.

There are certain foundations of effective communication, and all are revealed and explored in this chapter. They are: clarity, brevity, simplicity, authenticity, and – sometimes surprisingly – humility, or the power of listening.

Whereas references to Heraclitus’ doctrine of universal flux are abundant in Nietzsche’s works, remarks about Heraclitus’ style are few and appear to be limited to the early works. One striking assessment, given Heraclitus’ reputation of obscurity, features in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks: “Hardly anyone has ever written with as lucid and luminous a quality”. The chapter aims at clarifying the relationship between Heraclitus’ fragments, most of which can be described as “aphorisms,” and Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the aphoristic style he himself practices, and at showing why Nietzsche’s systematic reconstruction of Heraclitus’ doctrine takes the form of a cento, a literary form where originally disjoint Heraclitean aphorisms are brought together in a doxographic recomposition that makes of Heraclitus, at the cost of some important tweakings, the tragic, Dionysian philosopher he never ceased to be in Nietzsche’s eyes – as clear and as obscure as Nietzsche himself.

Aristotle here considers the effect of diction, or word choice, on rhetorical argument. Metaphors, epithets, special dialects, the use of the voice to convey passion or emotion, and the necessary parts of any speech are all considered here.

Intercultural interactions in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) are increasingly becoming the norm as speakers of diverse first languages and cultures find themselves needing to communicate in both personal and professional domains for any number of reasons. The chapter provides an overview of ELF pragmatics research that is focused on how multilingual, multicultural speakers in real-world settings achieve mutual understanding through the effective use of ELF. Specifically, the chapter examines the pragmatic strategies that speakers deploy to preempt misunderstanding as they conjointly negotiate and construct shared meaning. Practices that enhance explicitness and clarity, such as repetition, rephrasing, topic negotiation, and the insertion of a parenthetical remark that provides additional information, reveal how speakers who anticipate difficulty in understanding, possibly arising from linguistic variability and cultural difference, increase efforts to minimize mis/non-understanding. Using data extracts from relevant ELF studies, the chapter illustrates how speakers in these intercultural interactions accommodate their interlocutors and the context of communication to arrive at shared understanding.

Overview of the main issues in Galen's scientific epistemology , the state of the art, and the contents of this volume.

This chapter examines the change in the fortunes of Galen that began to occur at the time when Aristotle was beginning to be recognised as the supreme ancient authority in the Arabic world, eventually eclipsing the reputation of Galen, at least as a philosopher. It shows how Galen’s pre-eminence as a philosophical authority was gradually undermined by a sequence of commentators on his great work of scientific method, On Demonstration. Its main focus is on al-Rāzī’s Doubts about Galen composed in order to bolster Galen’s reputation when it was beginning to be challenged, notably by al-Fārābī. Central to al-Rāzī’s (partial) defence is an endorsement of Galen’s strong, Aristotelian notion of a demonstrative empirical science, as well as of his rejection of mere induction and argument from example as appropriate means of arriving at the requisite axiomatic principles. However, al-Rāzī takes Galen to task for failing to observe his own distinctions, and for taking insufficient care to ground his own fundamental assumptions. Al-Rāzī then applies his modified Galenian method to theological arguments, notably design-arguments, and in order to reject supposedly fallacious materialists’ arguments against creation. The article then turns to al-Fārābī, who in contrast directly attacks Galen’s inferential methods to support contrary, Aristotelian, positions.

Michael D. Hurley’s chapter considers the many applications of the concept of style and pursues its historical fortunes across a range of writers. Although style has been variously configured and refigured, what is apparent is that the ideal of clarity, so frequently promoted by style guides and other textbooks, is not the only objective of style, especially not in literary fiction and non-fiction.

This chapter challenges the binary contrast between ’myth’ and rational account (logos), reviewing the negative impact of the application of that dichotomy when used to draw contrasts between properly scientific modes of discourse and those to be dismissed as irrational. Ethnographic reports show that there is often no equivalent to our term ’myth’ in indigenous vocabularies, at least not one that carries similar pejorative undertones. The arguments of Lévi-Strauss that systems of myth may convey ’concrete science’ have the merit of taking those systems seriously, but still imply a pejorative binary judgement.

This chapter examines the varying roles that definitions may play in scientific investigations. Obviously they may laudably aim at clarifying the problem to be explored, but the demand and search for univocal definitions can have a limiting effect on the inquiry subsequently pursued. When a definition is presented as the goal of an investigation, for example of the characteristics of an animal species, that may have the effect of obscuring some of the complexities that may be uncovered along the way. The problem of the role of definitions in an axiomatic system such as Euclid’s lies in their presumed self-evidence.

Of all Victorian authors, Trollope comes closest to aspiring to the “degree zero” style that has played such an important role in modern theorizations of prose. Committed to an ideal of stylistic transparency, Trollope sought the unmediated transmission of authorial thought-content, borrowing from the more psychological strains of belletrism. However, Chapter 5 challenges the moralization of Trollope’s “disappearing” style as honest or forthright by cataloguing the acts of formal deception necessary to render such effects. Moreover, Trollope’s writings on style reveal his interest in non-mimetic features of prose such as harmony and rhythm, challenging “ease” and “lucidity” as preeminent realist virtues. The chapter concludes that Trollope’s blend of Attic simplicity with Ciceronian schemes proves his style to be one of the most artfully mannered in Victorian English, creating an impression of aesthetic virtuosity where many critics have seen only functional pedestrianism.

This brief Epilogue maps out the implications of the findings of this book on the various branches of the “science of eloquence” (ʿilm al-balāgha) and their role in poetic beauty. While faṣāḥa comes to refer to the correct, clear, and articulate way of conveying ideas, balāgha comes to refer to the conveying of ideas in a beautiful way after securing its faṣāḥa. Nevertheless, clarity often remains part of the definition of balāgha in Arabic criticism. The Epilogue concludes that this call for clarity is included in classical sources not as a determining feature of eloquence, but as a limit to the obscuring aspects of indirectness, implicitness, and unexpectedness necessary for rendering language beautiful.