objective, although sometimes intentionally but subversively masked from the reader until just the right moment, was always clear to Lewis. He knew where he was leading his readers. Lewis’s letters and occasional diary entries modeled his journalistic skill of clear and memorable description. Lewis does not wander aimlessly—even though as a reader you may, at times, not know exactly where he is or where he is leading you, he knows. His books, essays, lectures, stories and poems focused on illuminating a specific idea linked to a precise purpose.
Clarity was an important communication goal for Lewis, whether writing a novel or helping a student express his or her ideas in a tutorial. A specific strategy for being clear is to use precisely the correct word. Having the command of a large vocabulary gave Lewis the ability to use just the right word rather than needing to pile on unneeded words. Brevity was more than the soul of wit; it was his pathway to clarity. Lewis marshalled words to achieve a memorable style. Chapter 5 describes Lewis’s principle of intentionality.
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Effective Communicators Are Transpositional
The third principle is that of transposition. Lewis described this unique communication concept in a sermon published as delivered at Mansfield College, Oxford University, in June 1944. To transpose is to transform something from one level to another. Transpose is a musical term. To transpose from one musical key to another is to play the same tune written in, for example, the key of D down a whole tone to the key of C. All notes in both the melody and harmony are played, or transposed, to a different key. Transposition for Lewis was always a process of going from the higher to the lower. As he described the process, transposition is moving from a richer, more-detailed, more-colorful, multidimensional experience to a less-rich, less-detailed but nonetheless accurate explanation in an attempt to communicate (or transpose). He sought a way to illustrate how an ineffable emotion could more easily be understood by someone. Some experiences, especially emotional ones, are simply too rich, “high,” inexplicable, or foreign to the experiences of others, to adequately describe. “Symbolism,” wrote Lewis to Sister Penelope in a March 25, 1943 letter, “exists precisely for the purpose of conveying to the imagination what the intellect is not ready for.”130 Transposition is a communication process that uses similes and metaphors—especially visual metaphors—to express emotional ideas that the “intellect is not ready for.”131
How do you describe the emotional impact of Grand Canyon to someone who is blind? How do you express the joy experienced when listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to someone who is deaf? In each instance one would transpose—use a means of communication with which the listener is familiar—to describe a richer (“higher”) experience that is completely foreign and unobtainable. Metaphor, simile, and allegory are key communication strategies to express the inexpressible. The story of the incarnation, suggests Lewis, is a classic example of the metaphorical process of transposition when myth became fact.
Effective communicators are able to select symbols, images, metaphors, or make other comparisons to clarify that which is difficult to explain prosaically. The principle of transposition makes the ineffable effable, the murky clear, and the difficult-to-comprehend more easily grasped. Lewis was a master of this technique often relying on visual metaphor, comparisons, “supposals,” and other tropes to express complex or hard-to-explain ideas. Chapter 6 describes the process of transposition in detail and uses Lewis’s own words and examples to illustrate the concept.
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Effective Communicators Are Evocative
The fourth communication principle, that effective communicators are evocative, involves getting messages out of the reader or listener, stimulating both their hearts and minds to help them discover meaning. To evoke is to elicit, awaken, arouse, induce, and stimulate. C. S. Lewis used a variety of communication techniques to evoke images and emotions from his readers and listeners. Lewis knew that people are more likely to believe “data” drawn from their personal experiences, rather than to rely on the descriptions of others. Chapter 7 discusses Lewis’s methods for evoking a response, especially an emotional response, from his readers and listeners.
How does Lewis evoke emotional meaning? He describes a situation for the reader or listener rather than tells someone how to feel. The key to evoking a response is not to tell someone what to feel, but to paint a picture with words so that the reader or listener experiences his or her own emotional reaction. Lewis once suggested that he didn’t consider himself effective at making strong, explicit emotional appeals to listeners, such as making an emotion-infused, impassioned plea to persuade others.132 He would not, he said, be good at using strong emotional appeals to make successful “alter calls” in a religious service.133 He did, however, effectively describe emotion-evoking situations by telling stories, using illustrations, and creating visual metaphors that resulted strong emotional responses from his readers and listeners. His best-selling Narnia series is successful, in large part, because it connects emotionally with readers. Lewis called the evocation of emotional response a “surprisingness.” The story of Aslan and other characters does more than tell a tale; it creates an emotional response that we want to experience again and again as we re-read the Narnia books.
When reading a book a second time we already know what will happen in the story; we re-read to experience the emotion of the story. We re-read a book or may see a favorite movie again and again not to be surprised by what will happen, but to evoke an emotional response to the story. Lewis suggested that an author or speaker should not tell someone what to feel, but rather, set the stage and create a scene that evokes a response.
Effective Communicators Are Audience Centered
Finally, Lewis was focused on his audience. To be audience centered is to know that ultimately it is the reader or listener who will make sense out of any message that is crafted. People who heard Lewis on the radio when he was delivering his ←24 | 25→Broadcast Talks attended to his message because he had a gift for making a direct connection with the listener. Readers find, too, a personal quality in his ability to connect to the reader. His journey from being raised a Christian, to becoming an atheist during his adolescence and young adulthood, and then returning to belief in God and ultimately a strong Christian belief in his 30s, gave him insight into the skeptical audience he was often trying to reach. Chad Walsh, one of the first scholars to study Lewis and his work aptly subtitled his book about Lewis Apostle to the Skeptics. Walsh knew that Lewis’s message was designed to reach those who may have doubt and uncertainties, who may need their faith bolstered. That audience remains wide and vast, as do Lewis readers.
Mere Christianity was and remains popular because of Lewis’s ability to keep his audience (his reader, or in the case of his broadcast talks, his listener) in his mind’s eye. How does Lewis develop an author-listener relationship? He offers this pithy communication advice in his essay “Christian Apologetics” when he proclaims, “We must learn the language of our audience.”134 As noted earlier, Lewis was not attempting to write the final word about Christianity but to provide an open invitation, especially for those who already believed in Christianity, to explore their beliefs more deeply. After delivering one of his early Broadcast Talks, he wrote to a friend with this assessment of his audience: “I assumed last night that I was talking to those who already believed. If I’d been speaking to those who didn’t, of course everything I’d said would have been different.”135
As
