Grice's conversational maxims
The announcement went out and half the people still ask the same question. Their attention is not the problem. The text is.
'Will you come?' — 'I have a lecture.' Nobody said the word no and everybody heard it: the hearer runs on four expectations, and when you plainly break one, they work out the meaning themselves.
Take your last three announcements and run four checks on each: is everything needed there, is everything true, are there sentences that do not belong, is anything readable two ways. Rewrite the worst one.
The full biography is on the public version →
No freely licensed likeness of this person exists, so this is a generated emblem. It is not a portrait.
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
Loading…
These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Mobilising others, Self-command
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Mobilising others
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Self-command
shared competencies: Rhetoric, Mobilising others
Opens in the member workspace — you need to be signed in.
The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
Links to publishers and libraries. There are no links to unauthorised copies here, and there will not be.
- Stanford Encyclopedia on Paul Grice
- Stanford Encyclopedia on pragmatics — where the maxims live today
Links open in a new window.