To share a brief thought, the above comment gives me a bad juju because it puts a contested perspective into a forceful and authoritative voice, while being long enough that one might implicitly forget that this is a hypothetical authority talking[1]. So it doesn’t feel to me like a friendly conversational technique. I would have preferred it to be in the first person.
Garcia Márquez has a similar but longer thing going on in The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World, where everything after “if that magnificent man had lived in the village” is a hypothetical.
To share a brief thought, the above comment gives me a bad juju because it puts a contested perspective into a forceful and authoritative voice, while being long enough that one might implicitly forget that this is a hypothetical authority talking[1]. So it doesn’t feel to me like a friendly conversational technique. I would have preferred it to be in the first person.
Garcia Márquez has a similar but longer thing going on in The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World, where everything after “if that magnificent man had lived in the village” is a hypothetical.
(fwiw I didn’t mind the format and felt like this was Cathleen engaging in good faith.)