Final Thoughts | Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
And at long last, we come to the final thoughts. Through real-life patterns of deception, we can identify weaknesses in our writing and shift those… Read More »Final Thoughts | Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
And at long last, we come to the final thoughts. Through real-life patterns of deception, we can identify weaknesses in our writing and shift those… Read More »Final Thoughts | Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
The mystery genre requires careful threading of information from character to character, between narrator and reader, and from author to audience. And Agatha Christie, as… Read More »The Misdirection of Agatha Christie | Liar, Liar
Now that we’ve explored the Cooperative Principle and how to break it, we turn our attention back to our three layers of dialogue. Breaking the CP… Read More »Breaking the CP on 3 Layers | Liar, Liar
Continuing in the Cooperative Principle and how to break it, we turn our attention to a literary example of rampant unintentional violations: Miss Bates from… Read More »Miss Bates of Emma: A Liar, Liar Case Study
Although H. P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle provides lovely guidelines for how to accomplish good communication, for writers, its real value lies in breaking it. We… Read More »Breaking the Cooperative Principal | Liar, Liar
In the 1960s and 70s, linguist H. Paul Grice defined the Cooperative Principle to explain dynamics of conversation. Even though his work hinges on real-life… Read More »The Cooperative Principle | Liar, Liar
We complete the barrier object series with our final entry: hedges and qualifiers. These rhetorical tidbits come in many forms. The terms “hedge” and “qualifier”… Read More »Hedges and Qualifiers | Liar, Liar
Our barrier object series continues with expanded verb structures. These come in a variety of forms. A Rundown of Verb Features In the simplest of… Read More »Expanded Verb Structures | Liar, Liar
The next offender in our sequence of barrier objects is a big one: filter verbs. Filter Verbs Defined She felt the cold November wind wafting… Read More »Filter Verbs | Liar, Liar
Continuing in our series of literary barrier objects, we delve into the boondoggle of excessive, expressive dialogue tags. The Basics A dialogue tag, as its… Read More »Excessive Expressive Dialogue Tags | Liar, Liar