Come forth into the Stadium of Rhetoric!

First, I’d like to note that this text appears to have roused our inner creative writers. I’ve read some really great titles and humorous posts this morning :)

Overall, I found a lot of interesting passages in today’s reading. In the interest of time (and word count) I decided to narrow my focus to “Taste,” specifically the sub-category of “Clarity.”

On Clarity: Maybe I’ve been thinking about this topic WAY too much lately, as I just finished a few chapters of "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams. On Tuesday, I’m co-presenting a “guest lecture” on technical report writing to a Mechanical Engineering capstone class (sidenote: my technical report writing experience=nada. I thank you in advance for any suggestions on how to build my ethos.) The professor specifically wants us to address clarity, and honestly, I find this a difficult subject to explain. To say “the writing is unclear” is so abstract, yet I throw that phrase around all the time. Here’s how anonymous explains it:

“Clarity renders language plain and intelligible. It is achieved by two means, the use of current terms and of proper terms” (252, second column).

Wow, a clear, concise statement on clarity! I should’ve saved my time and just read Rhetorica Ad Herennium instead. I actually think this definition works perfectly for a modern audience, and especially for a group of technical writers.

“Current terms are such as are habitually used in everyday speech. Proper terms are such as are, or can be, the designations specially characteristic of the subject or discourse” (252, second column).

Ah, more definitions. Something I’ve enjoyed about Plato, Aristotle and now Anonymous is their use of definitions to-ahem-clarify terms. This sentence is a bit murkier than the last, but I still find it incredibly useful.

If you’re writing a technical report, it’s best to use conversational language: you want your boss, investors and non-engineers to understand your report as well as experts in your field. However, just because you use “everyday speech,” you don’t have to shy away from technical terms where appropriate. Your discourse community is other engineers and people who work with engineers.

In sum, I was surprised to find that a classical definition of clarity still holds true today. In some ways, I think Anonymous had a better grasp on it then than we do now. Clarity is something that readers’ value in writing, and it’s a term the writing community tosses around regularly. I find it interesting that Anonymous placed such importance on clarity as a sub-category of taste, one of the three qualities of style. Some things never change, I guess!