Looking through my cupboards for neglected notes which just have to be used before they pass their sell by date, I found the following quotation, and comment:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

I love that quote. Aside from the message, I love that it surprised me. I didn't guess the ending. Maybe that's just me, but when someone starts comparing the unreasonable man to the reasonable man, you can usually guess how it's going to come out.

It's amazing the twists and turns that can occur in the space of a couple sentences. Even a single sentence.

Probably I should've left it at that and posted it. However, I went on to say:

I have this idea that paragraphs and even sentences should be structured like a story. The most dramatic or telling sentence should be the last one in the paragraph. You should push the payoff words to the end of the sentence the same way the climactic scene is pushed as near as possible to the end of the book.

You'll appreciate that I backed myself into a corner, because I should have proceeded to supply a brilliant example, preferably from my own writing. Unfortunately I wasn't sure I could find an example, was too lazy to look for one, and feared if I found one it might be lousy. Not only that, I suspected that our editor edited out of our books all the sentences I composed according to that theory.

Moral: Keep your writing theories to yourself.