The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph

• The trivium includes those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to mind, and the quadrivium, those aspects of the liberal arts that pertain to matter. Logic, grammar, and rhetoric constitute the trivium; and arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy constitute the quadrivium.
• Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating through from one mind to another, the adaption of language to circumstance.
• Each of the liberal arts is both a science and an art in the sense that in the province of each there is something to know (science) and something to do (art).
• An art may be used successfully before one has a formal knowledge of its precepts.
• Communication takes place only when two minds really meet. If the reader or listener receives the same ideas and emotions that the writer or speaker wished to convey, he understands (although he may disagree); if he receives no ideas, he does not understand; if different ideas, he misunderstands.
• The three R’s--reading, writing, and reckoning--constitute the core not only of the elementary education but also of higher education. Competence in the use of language and competence in handling abstractions, particularly mathematical quantities, are regarded as the most reliable indexes to a student’s intellectual caliber.
• Rhetoric is the master art of the trivium, for it presupposes and makes use of grammar and logic; it is the art of communicating through symbols ideas about reality.
• Understanding is the intuitive grasp of first principles. Science is knowledge of proximate causes. Wisdom is knowledge of ultimate causes--metaphysics in the natural order, theology in the supernatural order. Prudence is right reasoning about something to be done. Art is right reasoning about something to be made.
• The function of language is threefold: to communicate thought, volition, and emotion.
• There are possible only two modes of communicating ideas through a physical or material medium--by imitation or by symbol.
• An imitation is an artificial likeness, for example: a painting, photograph, cartoon, statue, pantomime, a gesture such as threatening with a clenched fist or rejecting by pushing away with the hands, and picture writing. There is no mistaking the meaning of a picture; it means what it resembles. [...] Within limits, however, imitation is a vivid and effective mode of communication.
• A symbol is an arbitrary sensible sign having a meaning imposed on it by convention. A sign is sensible, for it can be perceived by the senses. Every sign has meaning either from nature or from convention.
• All words are symbols with the exception of a very few imitative or onomatopoeic words, such as boom, buzz, hiss, plop, tickstock.
• Special symbols are designed by experts to express with precision ideas in a special field of knowledge, for example: mathematics, chemistry, music. Such special languages are international and do not require translation, for their symbols are understood by people of all nationalities in their own language.
• It is the nature of language to communicate through symbols. Language is a system of symbols for expressing our thoughts, volitions, and emotions.
• The human power to abstract and to study a selected aspect of reality is the measure of intellectual progress which contrast strikingly with the utter absence of such progress among irrational animals. Despite their wonderful instincts, which are often superior to the instincts of man. As human civilization advances, the proportion of abstract substantives in the language increases.
• The fundamental function of grammar is to establish laws for relating symbols so as to express thought. A sentence expresses a thought, a relation of ideas, in a declaration, a question, a command, a wish, a prayer, or an exclamation. Categorematic symbols are what are related; syncategorematic symbols are the meals for relating them; the relation itself is the sentence.
• Marks of punctuation do for written language what phrasing, stress, and some forms of intonation, such as raising the voice for a question, do for spoken language.
• That oral punctuation does for reading what punctuation marks do for writing becomes evident if one tries to read pages unpunctuated.
• Communication is dynamic; it is the conveying of an idea from one mind to another through a material medium, words or other symbols. If the listener or reader receives through language precisely the ideas put into it by the speaker or writer, these two have “come to terms”--the idea has passed successfully, clearly, from the giver to the receiver, from one end or term of the line of communication to the other.
• Education is the formal process of making explicit all that is implicit in a given proposition. Hence it is not an advance in knowledge. In this it differs radically from deduction, of which the syllogism is the form, for through the syllogism the mind advances to new knowledge. Through education we turn a proposition, as it were, inside out and upside down until we have explored all its content.
• The present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, for that is the only thing which he has, and a man cannot lose a thing that he has not--Marcus Aurelius
• A fallacy is a violation of logical principle disguised under an appearance of validity; it is an error in process. Falsity is an error in fact. Fallacy arises from an erroneous relation of propositions; falsity, from an erroneous relation of terms. A premise may be false; reasoning may be fallacious.
• To discover a fallacy is to discover the reason why the mind was deceived into regarding error as truth. To classify fallacies is to attempt to find common ground for such deception. But a given argument may be fallacious for more reasons than one, and hence it may exemplify more than one fallacy. Consequently, a classification of fallacies is neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.
• The requirements of truth are:
• What is thought must represent what is. (This is the norm of conception and of induction.)
• Thoughts must be consistent among themselves. (This is the norm of deduction.)
• Scientific induction as a method of discovering truth embraces five steps: observation, analogy, hypothesis, analysis and sifting of data, and verification of the hypothesis.
• Logic and rhetoric are concerned with the discovery and communication of truth directly from the mind of the author to the mind of the listener or reader. Poetic is a very different mode of communication, an indirect one that imitates life in characters and situations; readers or listeners share imaginatively the characters’ experiences as if they were their own; yet poetic rises out of knowledge as well as feeling ,and logic and rhetoric are employed in the communication of the whole, which goes beyond them. Poetic is argument through vivid representation.
• Persuasion is achieved by means of logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos requires one to convince the minds of the listeners or readers by proving the truth of what one is saying. Pathos requires one to pu the listeners or readers into a frame of mind favorable to one’s purpose, principally by working on the emotions. Ethos requires one to inspire in the audience, by courtesy and other qualities, confidence in one’s character, competence, good sense, good moral character, and good will.
• Poetry communicates experience that cannot be expressed in any other way. The poet sees and feels with a depth and intensity beyond that of the ordinary person; the poet communicates not thought only but this experience. To read poetry is to share the experience of the poet.
• Condense your sentences. Pack much meaning into few words. Use words that are fresh, accurate, vivid, specific.
• Verbs, above all, are the key to a rigorous style.
• To give your writing life and movement, use vivid verbs in the active voice. Put the verb idea into the verb rather than into an abstract noun with an empty verb like occur.
• Cut out deadwood--needless words that dilute your thought and make your style insipid, dull, wordy. Prefer the specific expression to the general, the positive to the negative, the definite to the indefinite.