What’s this? An anticlimactic plot twist? Guilty as charged! The Author-Audience Contract An unwritten contract exists between every author and their audience. The author promises… Read More »Finding the Anticlimactic Way Out
The crisis nears its end! Last week, in the midst of procrastinating a fair number of tasks, I read a book. It was a decent… Read More »A Crisis in Deciding What Matters Most
Nestled among the marked (or “dispreferred”) behaviors of discourse we find a lovely little linguistic feature known as “hedging.” Hedging is the default refuge of… Read More »Hedging with Modals and Modifiers
Once upon a time, a fictional dog didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of surviving to the end of the story. Old Yeller, Bristle Face, and Where the Red… Read More »Like a Dog in a Doomsday Flick
Virtue, unfortunately, is too often disposable in a doomsday plot. We’ve all seen it: two people of casual acquaintance thrown into a story line that… Read More »The Principle of Expendable Virtue
Doomsday catalysts come in many flavors: asteroids, volcanoes, earthquakes, alien invasions, global warming, global thermonuclear war, and so forth. These cataclysmic events project such an… Read More »Doomsday Determines the Truly Worthy
If you’re anything like me, you do a lot of things in life “for the experience.” “Hey, yeah, let’s try that roller coaster where you… Read More »Elevated by Experience
Long ago in my disaffected youth, I found great solace in the music of The Wallflowers. Fronted by singer-songwriter Jakob Dylan, this alt-rock band rose… Read More »Exhausting All Your Options
Over the course of human history, the greatest conflicts have revolved around government and the right to rule. “In the land of the blind, the… Read More »The Uncontested Right to Rule
Oh, the Interrogative Mood! What fun our questions bring to communication! Here’s a quick run-down: Direct Questions Direct questions come in question/answer pairs, where the… Read More »Always Ask the Right Questions