Disputed Issues

Despite our casual compartmentalization of many diametrically opposed beliefs, humans are also sensitive to cognitive dissonance that is mer...

Thomas and Turner ( Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose ) describe classic prose as nonargumentative , a characteristic bo...

The “curse of knowledge” concept and its limitations When a professor, accomplished in his discipline, proves unable to explain it, some...

Of the Writing Virtues (Clarity, Concision, and Euphony), Euphony is the odd-man out. You might even wonder why it belongs in this august g...

”Never use a long word where a short one will do,” is often repeated and seemingly unobjectionable advice, whose failures reveal additional...

The conquest of ambiguity Language is inherently ambiguous, but the classic-prose writing style entails minimizing conceptual ambigui...

Since unexplained consensus is a form of evidence , an important question is this: why have the opponents of legalese converged on plain-ta...

Formal prose, I’ve emphasized, is a writing style , a distinct type of writing, differing from the informal in its ideals and aspirations: ...

Recall the sequence (concrete to abstract, near to far): conversation – informal prose – formal prose – poetry Formal prose is a...

The practice of locating important new information at the end of a proposition (the “stress position”) is undervalued and misunderstood by...

Not incessantly but at least occasionally, unobtrusively yet obviously— formal writing hovers on the edge of awkwardness. This is unremark...

Most lawyers disregard the most useful principle of advanced writing : put new important matter at the sentence end (the stress position). T...

A legal-writing authority advises:  View your reader as a companionable friend—someone with a warm sense of humor and a love of sim...