Following junctures

The word crafty comes from an Old English word meaning skilled.  By the time the Old English period slipped into the Middle English period shortly before the time of Chaucer in the 1300s, the word crafty began to be used as skilled in being deceptive. 

Part of the meaning for crafty is that someone designs the construction of the deception.  That idea lies at the heart of finding deception in speech.  People have to design their lies, so they have to decide at what point in a person's story it begins to vary from what actually happened.

The idea of design enables those who analyze discourse structure to know where to look in people's stories for their deceptions.  Stories have juncture points.  These are points where either the action ends or changes or points where a change in cast is introduced.  From one juncture to the next, one can judge the plausibility of the story happening the way it is told.  Some deception designers decide to change multiple junctures.  But, no matter how many junctures are changed, the story has to end in the same way as it was reported to the police or investigative team. 

That makes each juncture have a plausibility rating as the proceeds from one juncture to another.  A contributing factor to the rating is how well the action of the juncture supports or points to the reported ending.  These pointers are the markers that show an emerging design to the unknown parts of an occurrence.  A second contributing factor to the rating is the amount of detail offered in the juncture.  A person doesn't necessarily have to have too little or too much in this rating.  The person just has to have an equal amount of detail to the level the juncture starts.

The lower the rating of pointing or equality, the higher the probability that the section of the story is the point at which it varies from actuality.  Those who like to deceive are usually very good, but are they skilled, crafty enough, in controlling what lies under the surface of normal discourse?  The amount of practice that one would have to put in to recognize what to do to evade pointing and equality is something deceivers are not willing to give.