Contrived is not worth a flip

I follow an internet group called Critical Discourse Analysis.  They begin dialogs on various topics.  Sometimes I comment, but mainly I don't.  I just see what others have to say mainly.  One of the topics started the other day began on deception in general, which I did comment on, but then it turned to lying in political speeches.  Now that topic I have read literature about, but mainly I leave that to the experts who actually enjoy it.

One of the people in the group decided to comment on my comment.  But, it was really an answer that seemed intuitively right, but ended up being rather irrelevant.  It was about the use of irony in testimony.  The comment used contrived speech from a Shakespearean play to prove its point.  I shake my head when people used contrived speech as examples.  It's not the same.  Real speech can be captured in writing and analyzed, but to use contrived speech as an example of spontaneous, real speech is a fault that braggarts and novices make.


I read an article last week about experts who tried to use contrived, experimental data or contrived examples of speech to prove a point about lying on the stand in a courtroom.  The author ripped the people to shreds on a number of counts.  Rightly so.  The experts were proud of their new-found, theoretical, psychologically based knowledge and didn't have any experience in analyzing real speech.  They also used language indicators that only work in experiments using contrived data.  There is a saying these people should pay more attention to.  "Get real, people."