Purposeful omission is the leaving out of particular nonessential details that can be assumed by the reader (if used in literature), according to the context and attitudes/gestures made by the characters in the stories. It allows for the reader to make their own abstract representation of the situation at hand.
In the book ''Why We Fought: America's Wars in Film and History'', author
Peter Rollins
Peter Rollins (born 31 March 1973) is a Northern Irish writer, public speaker, philosopher, producer and radical theologian.
Drawing largely from various strands of continental philosophy, Rollins' early work operated broadly from within the t ...
mentions that war movies in the US have purposely omitted some facts so as to make it acceptable to
the Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters building of the United States Department of Defense. It was constructed on an accelerated schedule during World War II. As a symbol of the U.S. military, the phrase ''The Pentagon'' is often used as a metony ...
.
In their book ''Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography'',
Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey discuss the difficulty of judging the authenticity of accounts of violence against women when these accounts are made by women in position of prestige and power as such women are likely to omit some details for their own image.
According to some authors, purposeful omissions are allowed to carry out the law in spirit and action.
In the context of technology, the term is used to denote the avoidance of unwanted or unnecessary feedback.
See also
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Casuistry
In ethics, casuistry ( ) is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and ju ...
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Case-based reasoning
In artificial intelligence and philosophy, case-based reasoning (CBR), broadly construed, is the process of solving new problems based on the solutions of similar past problems.
In everyday life, an auto mechanic who fixes an engine by recalli ...
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I know it when I see it
The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United St ...
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Iceberg Theory
The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When h ...
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Show, don't tell
Show, don't tell is a technique used in various kinds of texts to allow the reader to experience the story through actions, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's exposition, summarization, and description. It avoi ...
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Concision
Concision (also called brevity, laconicism, or conciseness) is a writing principle of eliminating redundancy.UNT Writing Lab. "Concision, Clarity, and Cohesion." Accessed June 19, 2012Link./ref> For example, this:
* "It is a fact that most argum ...
References
Narrative techniques
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