How can you make yourself smarter? Distilled from the author’s career as a teacher, writer, and research scientist, this book reveals some key habits and skills of intelligent people:

• How to write more clearly, important because writing is where we marshal our thoughts
• How to say things so others will understand them – and so you understand them yourself
• Pitfalls to avoid so language doesn’t play tricks on you
• How to spot fallacies of logic – not a dry traditional list, but the fallacies that actually come up in conversation, debate, and the media today
• How to understand information expressed as numbers, including statistics
• How to learn different subjects efficiently, with appropriate strategies for each

This is more than a writing guide, but not less; an appendix is a quick reference on English grammar and usage, pitched to the needs of educated people.

Michael A. Covington, Ph.D., was co-founder of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia, where he now holds an emeritus position. With degrees in linguistics, he has done research on subjects ranging from the teaching of writing to applied psycholinguistics, alongside the bulk of his work on computer analysis of language and on computer ethics and risks, and extensive writing in other areas. He is available for consulting and public speaking.