Here are two tricks that you don’t want to overuse, but they are fun just the same. Each “trick” is a reward for the reader, and we humans love the little endorphin rush we get from a reward.

The callback is a reference to something earlier in the text. Linguistically, it makes for strong cohesion—the author has artfully constructed a unified piece. But rhetorically, the callback rewards the reader for paying attention. It’s like a puzzle, and a reader gets the “joke” or the point, and sees how it all fits together.

In one of the last Samples you will read for the class, Chris Ryan’s Cuba Undistilled, Ryan sets up a scene on a plane about not getting a complimentary rum on his flight to Cuba. If appears to be a little conflict to begin the piece, to capture the reader’s attention. At the very end of the piece, he returns to that scene, making a callback, to make a larger argument. We might have thought a lot about that opening scene, or very little, but regardless, Ryan rewarded us for paying attention.

In a sample for this unit, Neal Stephenson describes the artistry of the “ruins” at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom. He then shifts the journey to one about television and media, and you think that the whole Disney World bit was an extended hook, but 1300 words later, he returns with an example in the last line of a graf, writing, “And so issues that are important to book-reading intellectuals, such as global environmental collapse, eventually percolate through the porous buffer of mass culture and show up as ancient Hindu ruins in Orlando.” Then, he’s back to interfaces for a few hundred words before returning to Disney World again in the very last graf. These callbacks reward the reader for paying attention. In fact, the Disney World bit wasn’t just an opener but, a careful construction to make his point.

The other trick is the turn. We see turns used in movies all the time (e.g., The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Moon). These are big surprise endings, but we can do more subtle things as well. Surprising a reader in fiction is almost de rigueur, but in nonfiction, it is less common, and probably for good reason. If we want lean, clear nonfiction prose, surprising a reader can make it seem like we don’t know what we are talking about.

In Stephenson’s “Interface Culture,” you get the sense that the author is dismissive of Disney World, making a reference early to suggest he would be better off if he were at home reading a book. He is seemingly making a subtle argument against artifice and in-authenticity, and then, suddenly, on the last page, he makes a turn. I will let you experience the turn yourself because it is an important one thematically, especially as we consider the implications and motives for travel and tourism. But I also don’t want to give you spoilers (although, I guess, I already spoiled it by suggesting something is coming in the end).