Michael A. Covington’s beautiful presentation “How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily” puts semantics and epistemology to work. Yay truth conditions!

I appreciate such instruction more after teaching CS314, where many students have trouble asking questions, organizing thoughts, and writing paragraphs. I feel these troubles are related. For example, a student who refers to function calls as “functions” is likely to ask confused questions. 必也正名乎 indeed. Nowadays I teach my students to check for “uninitialized variables” in their writing.