I’m a pretty big fan of the “Have someone say back what they understood you to mean, and clarify further” as a way to draw the concept boundary clearly. Learning commonly takes the form of someone giving an explanation, the learner using that concept to solve a problem, then the teacher explaining what mistake they’ve made, and iterating on this. It’s hard to create that experience in non-fiction (typically readers do not do the “pause for a minute and figure out how you would solve this”), and I currently think this sort of dialogue might be the best way in written form to cause readers to have the experience of “Yes, this makes sense and is what I believe” and then explaining why it’s false—because they’re reading the second character and agreeing with them.
From my experience, reading things like this was incredibly useful:
amber: Because as the truly great paranoid knows, what seems like a ridiculously improbable way for the adversary to attack sometimes turns out to not be so ridiculous after all.
coral: Again, that’s a not-exactly-right way of putting it.
I’m a pretty big fan of the “Have someone say back what they understood you to mean, and clarify further” as a way to draw the concept boundary clearly. Learning commonly takes the form of someone giving an explanation, the learner using that concept to solve a problem, then the teacher explaining what mistake they’ve made, and iterating on this. It’s hard to create that experience in non-fiction (typically readers do not do the “pause for a minute and figure out how you would solve this”), and I currently think this sort of dialogue might be the best way in written form to cause readers to have the experience of “Yes, this makes sense and is what I believe” and then explaining why it’s false—because they’re reading the second character and agreeing with them.
From my experience, reading things like this was incredibly useful: