Session 1: Component Teardown

Tag which of the four apology components are present, absent, or hollow in a real apology

Weight: 1%

Before the session, pick an apology you haven’t looked at through the four-component lens yet. It can be personal or public, written or something you remember well enough to transcribe. Don’t pre-sort it — the marking-up happens in the session itself.

In the session, pairs annotate their partner’s apology using the four components from the lecture: acknowledgment, responsibility, regret, remedy. Underline or bracket the exact phrase doing each job. Some components will have no phrase at all — mark that as clearly as a component that’s present. Then, for every component that is present, answer one extra question: is it doing real work, or is it there because an apology is expected to have one? A “commitment to change” that’s just “this won’t happen again” with no mechanism behind it is present and empty at the same time.

If a partner’s apology turns out to have every component clearly present, with nothing to flag as hollow, don’t manufacture a doubt just to have something to report. Say instead which component came closest to feeling redundant with another — regret and acknowledgment tend to blur together in real apologies — and what specifically would have to change in the wording to actually collapse them into one.

Afterwards, each pair reports one component from their apology that technically appears but earns its place the least. Keep that example — Week 3 asks which of the four actually carries the weight, and a component that’s present but hollow is exactly the case that argument needs.

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