Martin Meenagh blog

  Much of the skill involved in verbal reasoning is located in the capacity to unlock the tone of an author and to see the scaffolding of language that has generated it. This often involves looking at the points where an author changes tense, and carefully looking at the objects of their sentences and at word-order in the rhetorical points they make. It is possible to become somewhat overly sensitive (to the point of pretension) but the skill is deadly serious; a person who can parse, dissect and extract meaning from sentences is in possession of a very great skill.   Consider the passage below;   It would then be a campaign unlike the ones which had preceded it. Counting by the full spectrum of complete Right to absolute Left, the political differences would be minor, but what would be not at all minor was the power of each man to radiate his appeal into some fundamental depths of the American character. One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America ...

  One tendency amongst students is to be verbose. This concentration on wordiness is sometimes encouraged by academic reading and tuition. Often, those who write on keyboards are not used to assessing how long their sentences are. When people write in this fashion, points are lost and readers become unsure of what they are reading.   Exactly the same cognitive point applies to readers. Few people are trained these days, either by themselves or others, to concentrate a passage into its key points.   I would like to show you how to analyse and condense a passage by using what might seem an intimidating extract from Blaise Pascal. The full quote is below.     “Your desired destination is faith, but you do not know the road. You want to cure yourself of unbelief, and you ask for remedies; learn from those who were hampered like you and who now wager all they possess. These are people who know the road you would like to follow; they are cured of the malad...

 Some undergraduates have in the past benefitted from advice about papers. Here is some about papers which are focussed on the historical meaning or importance of architecture. It relates to paper writing in general.  There are several ways of including a location or building in a paper. One should first of all define clearly whether one wishes to adopt a narrow or a broad view; are you looking at a place for itself—its aesthetics, structure, or impression to you—are are you going to connect the place, your impression of it, or its history to some greater thing? So—crudely, set up a tickbox. Am I talking about architecture or the way architecture reflects and builds society? Am I talking about a place or building or collection of buildings or is my primary focus the history of something greater?   It may help to focus upon an activity or person connected with the place. So, for instance, fleet street seems apt to connect to newspapers or to the way in which the ...