Word: ploy
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Though such a declaration of interest is unexpected, at least it is forthright--much more so than the publisher's less-evident ploy of adorning the back cover with a glowing comment from someone quoted copiously in the text, it also obliquely relieves the misgivings of a reader who may have expected a balanced discussion...
Paisley's declaration was not his only melodramatic ploy. Earlier, he had staged a nighttime muster for five Belfast journalists. They were taken in a blacked-out van to a windswept hillside, where they emerged to see 500 men drawn up in military ranks. The men, warned Paisley, were only a fraction of the Protestant force that could fight for continued union...
...Communist Party is not making Mitterrand's task easy. Marchais has recently begun insisting that a Mitterrand government should include Communist ministers, a ploy meant to frighten moderate voters. Paradoxically, as in 1978, France's Moscow-oriented Communist Party feels less threatened by Giscard than by Mitterrand, whose avowed aim is to reduce Communist influence by strengthening the Socialist Party...
...demands, from the five-day week to access to the national media to the farmers' union. The government presumably hoped to portray Solidarity as leading the country toward economic and social ruin, a point that official television commentators have begun to make regularly. If so, the ploy failed. At one point, to show that other countries worked on Saturdays, a government representative ineptly pointed out that French consumers could even buy cars on Saturday. Responded the Solidarity side: because of the perennial shortages of automobiles, Poles cannot buy them in midweek...
Sections on current events are an obvious ploy, but students do not demand anything that bald. I once had a very successful section in which I discussed a research idea that the professor and I had developed in casual conversation earlier that day. Anything which breathes life into the litany of contructs and generalizations is going to be well appreciated, whether it sheds light on the process of real life--or just academic life. The students will follow the lectures with renewed enthusiasm, and the professor will be very grateful for a class that stops sleeping...