11) Vagueness and ambiguity: The use of gaps, of shifting, oscillating, and unsystematic forms of expression (rather than systematic forms) is important in giving listeners and readers an opportunity to gain knowledge which is, so to speak, is accessible to them; it is continuous with their own being and not alien to them; it is meaningful to them in their lives, rather than having a meaning imposed on it in a one-way fashion by authoritative (Humpty-Dumpty like) others. The two-way nature of dialogically-structured exchanges allows people to make what they learn their own. Bakhtin (1981) puts the issue this way: As he sees it there are two kinds of discourse, "authoritative" and "internally persuasive discourse." The meanings of terms in authoritative discourse are, in being unresponsive to modification by coming into contact with other voices, fixed. "The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority fused into it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is prior discourse..." (p.342). By comparison: "Internally persuasive discourse...is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with ‘one’s own word’. In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition... it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses...The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean" (pp.345-346). Thus strangely, the very idea of a need for clarity, for disciplinary terms to be learned to have a single, unambiguous meaning or definition, makes mindful learning impossible – if by mindful learning we mean learning that we can apply flexibly to new circumstances as they arise.