Words for Personality, Behavior, and Emotion
Someone leaves a gate unlatched twice after being reminded. Were they careless, negligent, forgetful, or reckless? All four are unflattering, and all four describe roughly the same afternoon. They are not the same word, and a sentence that gives you a motive will only accept one of them. Vocabulary about people is difficult for a […]
Words for Evidence and Judgment
“A loose wire was a plausible explanation for the intermittent signal.” Read that carefully and notice what it does not say. It does not say a loose wire caused the problem. It says the idea holds up well enough to be worth taking seriously. That gap between believable and true is where most reading errors […]
