Week 1: What Is an Apology, Actually?

Apology defined against its nearest neighbours — regret, excuse, and justification — using four ordinary "sorry" messages that are not all doing the same job

22 February 2027

Open the slides

Four messages, all of which someone has probably sent you:

I’m sorry you feel that way.

I was exhausted and wasn’t thinking straight.

I did it because you’d already ignored me twice.

I shouldn’t have said that, and I’m sorry it hurt you.

Only the last one is an apology. The first names a feeling and puts it on the other person, not the speaker. The second explains a cause without owning the act. The third argues the act was warranted. Only the fourth does both things an apology actually requires: names the wrong as the speaker’s, and accepts responsibility for it rather than accounting for it.

Regret, excuse, justification

  1. Regret

    An internal state (“I wish that hadn’t happened”) that commits to nothing.

  2. Excuse

    A cause offered for the act, which can lower blame without removing it.

  3. Justification

    A claim the act was the right call given the circumstances — denies there was anything to apologise for.

  4. Apology

    Accepts the act was wrong and that the speaker is answerable for it, regardless of cause or context.

The four are easy to blend in a single sentence, which is exactly how a non-apology gets produced without anyone intending one: “I’m sorry, but you’d been ignoring me” starts as an apology and ends as a justification, and the justification is what actually governs how the sentence lands.

Why the distinction is load-bearing

None of this is a vocabulary exercise. Confusing regret for apology is why “I feel bad about it” gets offered as if it settled something. Confusing excuse for apology is why “I was stressed” gets treated as a repair. The distinction matters because only one of the four commits the speaker to anything.

A message that resists sorting

Not every real message drops cleanly into one box. Take: “I’m sorry, I really am, I just don’t know what else I could have done.” The first half is apology-shaped — first person, present tense, the word itself. The second half is a justification wearing an apology’s opening clause, and it’s doing more work than the opening: it asks the listener to conclude no better action existed, which is exactly the claim a justification makes. Sorted as a single category, this message is a justification with an apology-shaped preamble, not a genuine apology that happens to explain itself. The categories aren’t failing here — the message is mixing two moves in one sentence, and the sorting exercise’s job is to notice the seam, not to force a single label onto something that is doing two things at once.

Week 2 takes the fourth category apart: acknowledgment, responsibility, regret, and remedy are not one move but four, and an apology can contain some of them without containing all.

In class: was that even an apology?

Before class, find the message. It has to be real — something actually sent or received, not a hypothetical. If it’s one you’re not comfortable sharing verbatim, bring a close paraphrase; the wording matters less than the shape of the move it makes.

In class, messages get swapped and sorted, blind, into the four categories above: regret, excuse, justification, apology. The person who brought the message doesn’t get to sort their own — someone else does, and has to say why out loud. Disagreements are the point: the same sentence often reads as an excuse to one person and an apology to another, and the argument about which is happening is more useful than either verdict alone.

If your pair can’t agree on which category a message belongs to after a real attempt — not thirty seconds of shrugging — don’t force a resolution before moving on. Write down both readings and what each one is keying off; the message that resists a clean verdict is usually more useful to your one-sentence definition than one that sorted easily, because it tells you what your definition has to be able to handle, not just what it has to match.

Afterwards, each pair produces one sentence: “an apology is a statement that ___.” It has to survive being tested against every message the pair looked at, including the ones that argued the hardest. That sentence is what Week 2 starts from — and immediately complicates.

Teaching team