Sigh.

Your right as usual, the point of writing is communication, not simply following grammar rules. But many of those rules are there for a reason. A person who is excited about everything is excited about nothing. Ending every sentence with an exclamation point is like living in a world where everyone is equally tall.

Food for your contextual thought.

Context is everything. Context is everything even in law. For example, we try to understand WHY someone murdered another for the purpose of punishment. Someone who kills while insane is not punished as severely as a cold blooded serial killer. The true mark of an unjust dictatorship is one that judges without context.

One a personal level, we can almost never fully understand context. That’s why we should avoid judging others personally. So for me, it works like this: tell that woman that she needs to STOP SMOKING! Tell her the danger involved. But it sounds like she already knows and is having a great deal of trouble stopping.

Here is maybe where the difficulty lies, I think. Giving the person the facts is not judging them. Telling the facts is nothing more than informing the person of available knowledge. You’ve told her, she hasn’t stopped smoking… this is when people start judging. We say, “What a bitch” or “What a terrible person” or “She’s going to hell”. That’s what judging a person is about. It’s declaring the quality of the person without context. It’s ok to give info, but deciding what others should do with that info is the pure nature of judgement and is a hint into why we should avoid it.

Teach away, Nat! But don’t judge them. My two cents. A long ramble.

1) What story is that? Sounds like a Yukio Mishima story, ha!
2)I love it. Great idea!
3) Yup