Reference Centre

Short practice

1. 1. Rewrite with fronting: 'I have never seen a film that bored me more.'

   Reveal

   Never have I seen a film that bored me more.

2. 2. Rewrite with fronting: 'I won't forgive that comment in a hurry.'

   Reveal

   That comment I won't forgive in a hurry.

3. 3. Rewrite with fronting: 'She walked in, exhausted and triumphant.'

   Reveal

   Exhausted and triumphant, she walked in.

Short practice

1. 1. Your boss is famously careful with money. Which of the three would you use to her face?

   Reveal

   'Thrifty' — warm. 'Stingy' is an insult; 'careful with money' is neutral but flat.

2. 2. A friend won't let go of a bad idea. You want to push back without offending. Choose.

   Reveal

   'Stubborn' — cool but not cruel. 'Pig-headed' is a fight.

3. 3. Describing a model in a fashion piece you admire.

   Reveal

   'Slim' — warm/positive. 'Skinny' carries judgement.

Short practice

1. 1. Soften: 'This budget is too low.'

   Reveal

   'This budget feels a little tight, doesn't it?' or 'I was wondering whether there's any flex on the budget.'

2. 2. Soften: 'You're wrong about the deadline.'

   Reveal

   'I may be misreading the brief, but isn't the deadline the 14th rather than the 17th?'

3. 3. Soften: 'I don't want to take on this project.'

   Reveal

   'I'd love to help — I'm just not sure I'm the best fit for this one right now.'

Short practice

1. 1. Make this sentence formal, warm, lay: 'Login's bust for some users, gonna patch it.'

   Reveal

   'I wanted to flag that some users can't currently log in — we'll have a fix out shortly.'

2. 2. Make this sentence informal, cool, technical: 'I wanted to let you know we believe there may be a regression in the auth pipeline.'

   Reveal

   'Looks like a regression in the auth pipeline.'

3. 3. Make this sentence formal, cool, technical: 'Login is broken-ish.'

   Reveal

   'We are investigating an intermittent failure in the authentication service.'

Short practice

1. 1. Add self-irony to: 'I'm very passionate about productivity systems.'

   Reveal

   'I'm very passionate about productivity systems — which is why I've abandoned six this year.'

2. 2. Add self-irony to: 'I take my coffee very seriously.'

   Reveal

   'I take my coffee, allegedly, very seriously.'

3. 3. Add self-irony to: 'I'm convinced this is the right call.'

   Reveal

   'I'm convinced this is the right call — until lunchtime tomorrow.'

Short practice

1. 1. Re-frame 'tax increase' from the supporter's side.

   Reveal

   'a fairness adjustment' or 'restoring revenue'.

2. 2. Re-frame 'school cuts' from the cutter's side.

   Reveal

   'budget rebalancing' or 'spending discipline'.

3. 3. Add a loaded-question frame to: 'AI should be regulated.'

   Reveal

   'How much longer can we leave AI essentially unregulated?'

Short practice

1. 1. Concede-pivot: 'Remote work hurts mentoring.'

   Reveal

   'You're right that mentoring suffers — which is exactly why we need to design it deliberately, not assume the office does it for free.'

2. 2. Concede-pivot: 'AI tutors lack empathy.'

   Reveal

   'Granted, they lack empathy — and yet they offer availability that no human teacher can.'

3. 3. Concede-pivot: 'This proposal is expensive.'

   Reveal

   'Concede the cost entirely — but the alternative is more expensive over a decade.'

Short practice

1. 1. Turn into anaphora: 'We need clarity, courage and honesty about the costs.'

   Reveal

   'We need clarity. We need courage. We need honesty about the costs.'

2. 2. Turn into antithesis: 'This isn't really about money; it's about who decides.'

   Reveal

   'Not about money — about who decides.'

3. 3. Turn into tricolon: 'It's late, it's expensive and quite poorly designed.'

   Reveal

   'Late, expensive, poorly designed.'

Short practice

1. 1. Write a PROSPECT sentence for an essay on AI in classrooms.

   Reveal

   'What follows turns on a single distinction — between AI that explains and AI that decides.'

2. 2. Write a PIVOT sentence after a paragraph praising remote work.

   Reveal

   'That, however, only carries us so far; the harder question is what remote work does to people who join mid-career.'

3. 3. Write a CONSOLIDATE sentence after two paragraphs of evidence.

   Reveal

   'The picture so far is this: the trend is real, but its causes are local.'

Short practice

1. 1. Move 'AI will replace half of office jobs in a decade' from CLAIM to HEDGE.

   Reveal

   'AI may replace a meaningful share of office jobs in a decade — though both the share and the timeline are heavily contested.'

2. 2. QUALIFY: 'Reading fiction improves empathy.'

   Reveal

   'Reading fiction appears to improve perspective-taking on short-term measures; the long-term and large-scale evidence is thinner.'

3. 3. RETRACT: 'I said the launch would slip by a week.'

   Reveal

   'I want to retract what I said on Monday — the slip is closer to a month, and I should have said so then.'

Short practice

1. 1. Diplomatic version of 'We're furious with your government.'

   Reveal

   'We have made our disappointment clear through the usual channels.'

2. 2. Diplomatic version of 'If you raise prices we walk.'

   Reveal

   'A further price adjustment would, regrettably, require us to revisit the relationship.'

3. 3. Diplomatic version of 'Your proposal is unacceptable.'

   Reveal

   'The proposal as currently drafted does not yet allow us to move forward.'

Short practice

1. 1. Reframe 'We need 12 percent' as an interest question.

   Reveal

   'Help me understand what the 12 percent figure is protecting on your side — is it margin, signal, or precedent?'

2. 2. Propose an objective-criteria move on a salary dispute.

   Reveal

   'What public benchmark for similar roles would we both accept as a fair anchor?'

3. 3. Name a BATNA without threatening on a vendor dispute.

   Reveal

   'If we can't agree, we both have options we can live with — but neither option is as good as a deal here. So let's see if there's one.'

Short practice

1. 1. Reframe an attack: 'You don't trust me!' → mediator move.

   Reveal

   'There's a question of trust underneath that — can we name what would rebuild it for each of you?'

2. 2. Summarise back two opposed claims into a single shared question.

   Reveal

   'Both of you are asking the same question from opposite ends: who carries the risk if this fails?'

3. 3. Name a deadlock without taking sides.

   Reveal

   'We're stuck on the principle, not the number. Let's look at the principle directly.'

Short practice

1. 1. ACK a data leak affecting 12,000 customers.

   Reveal

   'On 14 March we discovered that the names and email addresses of approximately 12,000 customers were exposed via a misconfigured database. We are sorry, and we want to tell you what happened.'

2. 2. GAP a recall where the cause is uncertain.

   Reveal

   'We do not yet know whether the fault originates with the supplier or with our own assembly process. Both reviews are under way and will be published in full.'

3. 3. NEXT after a product safety incident.

   Reveal

   'Owners of affected models will receive a free recall notice within 48 hours. We will publish a weekly progress note until every unit is corrected.'

Short practice

1. 1. Open: telling a friend you can't host them this weekend after promising.

   Reveal

   'I have to break a promise. I can't host you this weekend, and I'm sorry — let me tell you what happened and what I can do instead.'

2. 2. Honest why for declining to publish a colleague's piece.

   Reveal

   'The piece isn't where we need it on the central argument; I don't think more edits will get it there. That's a judgment call, and it's mine to make.'

3. 3. Explicit relationship close after firing a long-term contractor.

   Reveal

   'Our work together ends on the 30th. I'd like to recommend you for the project at X; I'll make the introduction this week if you'd like.'

Short practice

1. 1. Convert to FREE INDIRECT: 'He opened the door. He thought, what am I doing here?'

   Reveal

   'He opened the door. What was he doing here. Honestly.'

2. 2. Convert to UNRELIABLE third: 'She knew she was right.'

   Reveal

   'She knew, with the certainty of someone who had been right about very few things, that she was right.'

3. 3. Convert to PSYCHIC third: 'He sat down. He was angry.'

   Reveal

   'He sat down, aware that the anger he had decided not to show was now in his shoulders.'

Short practice

1. 1. Rewrite as PERIODIC: 'He read the letter twice, slowly, the second time more slowly than the first.'

   Reveal

   'Twice, slowly — the second time more slowly than the first — he read the letter.'

2. 2. Rewrite as FRAGMENTED: 'The car wouldn't start, and the meeting was already underway.'

   Reveal

   'The car. Wouldn't start. Meeting already underway.'

3. 3. Rewrite as BALANCED: 'She came for the food; the conversation kept her there.'

   Reveal

   'She came for the food; she stayed for the conversation.'

Short practice

1. 1. Write an IRONIC restatement of: 'I look forward to the all-hands meeting.'

   Reveal

   'I look forward to the all-hands meeting with the kind of joy usually reserved for dental work.'

2. 2. Write the OPENING line of a PARODY of motivational LinkedIn posts.

   Reveal

   'At 4 a.m. last Tuesday, I made a decision that would change the entire course of my morning.'

3. 3. Write the OPENING line of a PASTICHE of a Victorian novel about a modern subject.

   Reveal

   'It was the best of broadband, it was the worst of broadband; the engineer would arrive between eight and twelve, or, conceivably, not at all.'

Short practice

1. 1. From 'He read the letter once, slowly, and then put it in the drawer with the others' — write ONE 'implies' claim.

   Reveal

   'The text implies there is a collection of such letters and that this one is being added to it deliberately, not destroyed.'

2. 2. From the same sentence — write ONE 'invites' claim.

   Reveal

   'The text invites a reading of patient accumulation: the drawer is being filled for someone, eventually.'

3. 3. From the same sentence — write ONE 'reader brings' acknowledgement.

   Reveal

   'I bring my own assumption that the letters are from a single sender; the text does not specify.'

Short practice

1. 1. Calibrated praise for a film with one outstanding lead performance.

   Reveal

   'The film holds, scene for scene, on a lead performance whose stillness is the most controlled work the actor has yet given.'

2. 2. Calibrated damage for a podcast that wanders in its second hour.

   Reveal

   'The first hour earns its run-time; the second is what happens when no one in the room is willing to be the one who says it's time to stop.'

3. 3. Comparative ranking of three novels by the same author.

   Reveal

   'It is sharper than the debut, less generous than the second, and the best read of the three for a first encounter.'

Short practice

1. 1. Rewrite as THESIS-FORWARD: 'I'm going to discuss some interesting findings about reading.'

   Reveal

   'This paper argues that adolescent reading rates have been mis-measured and that the corrected figures change the policy debate.'

2. 2. Rewrite with CONTROLLED NOMINALISATION: 'Things go on being persistent even when they aren't large.'

   Reveal

   'The persistence of small effects, rather than their magnitude in any one observation, is the analytically interesting feature.'

3. 3. Add POSITIONED CITATION to: 'Inequality has rising effects on trust.'

   Reveal

   'Following Putnam (2007) but against more recent revisionist accounts, this paper finds that rising inequality continues to predict declining institutional trust.'

Short practice

1. 1. Rewrite as ENDORSING: 'Carter (2019) talks about the procedural opacity variable.'

   Reveal

   'Carter (2019) establishes procedural opacity as a distinct and measurable variable.'

2. 2. Rewrite as CRITICAL: 'Lin and Park (2022) argue that culture explains the trust decline.'

   Reveal

   'Lin and Park (2022) attribute the trust decline to culture, leaning on a measure of culture that the paper itself acknowledges as imprecise.'

3. 3. Rewrite as CAUTIOUSLY POSITIONING: 'The paper says inequality matters.'

   Reveal

   'The paper argues that inequality remains a necessary, if not sufficient, condition.'

Short practice

1. 1. Group three sources on screen time into TWO lines of work.

   Reveal

   'Two lines of work meet on this question: one treating screen time as a behavioural input (Smith 2018, Jones 2019), another treating it as a proxy for displacement of other activity (Patel 2020).'

2. 2. Name the GAP in a literature on remote work and innovation.

   Reveal

   'What this literature has not yet asked is whether innovation declines are concentrated in early-career hires, who never had the in-person network to begin with.'

3. 3. POSITION a paper that joins an institutional account but qualifies it.

   Reveal

   'This paper sits in the institutional account, follows Lee on opacity, and qualifies the deterministic version of the claim by introducing two scope conditions.'

Short practice

1. 1. SCOPE hedge: 'Reading fiction improves empathy.'

   Reveal

   'On the short-term measures used in this literature, and in the populations sampled, reading fiction is associated with improvements in perspective-taking.'

2. 2. MECHANISM hedge: 'Density causes loneliness.'

   Reveal

   'Density is consistently correlated with loneliness in our data, but the design does not allow us to identify density as the mechanism rather than a marker of other features of dense neighbourhoods.'

3. 3. STRENGTH hedge: 'The effect is huge.'

   Reveal

   'The effect is robust at conventional levels and meaningful in practical terms, though smaller than headline accounts of the literature have suggested.'

Short practice

1. 1. RECEIVE FAIRLY a hostile review.

   Reveal

   'We thank the reviewer for the careful read and for three concerns that we take seriously and address one by one.'

2. 2. ACCEPT WITH PRECISION a methodological correction.

   Reveal

   'We accept this concern in full. We have re-estimated the model with cluster-robust standard errors and reported the corrected results in Table 3; the substantive conclusions are unchanged.'

3. 3. DISAGREE WITH SHARED GROUND on an interpretive dispute.

   Reveal

   'We share the reviewer's view that the engagement mechanism is under-determined by these data. We differ on whether that under-determination requires us to retract the mechanism claim or to flag it as a working hypothesis. We argue for the latter for the following two reasons.'