Session 2: The Ablation Test

Remove one component at a time from a working apology and identify which removal actually breaks it

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Before the session, have your Session 1 marked-up apology ready — the one with each component underlined and labelled present, weak, or missing. If you’re using a new example, mark it up the same way first; the ablation exercise doesn’t work on an un-annotated apology.

In the session, working from that marked-up text, remove one component at a time — cross it out, don’t just imagine it gone — and reread what’s left after each removal. For each one, decide: does the remainder still function as an apology, just a worse one, or does it stop functioning as an apology at all? Note which single removal did the most damage to your specific example.

Then trade with another pair. Compare notes: did the same component break both apologies, or did a different one turn out to matter most in theirs? If your two examples disagree about which component is load-bearing, that disagreement is the finding, not a problem to resolve — write down what was different about the two situations that made a different component critical (who was harmed, how, and what they were actually owed).

If removing every component seems to damage the apology by roughly the same amount, resist the pressure to name a single winner anyway. That’s a real, reportable outcome — some apologies distribute the work evenly across all four components rather than resting on one — and it’s worth noting which kind of harm produced that pattern, since Week 5 will ask what an apology is actually for, and an apology with no single load-bearing part may be one built to satisfy several functions at once.

Afterwards, hold onto both your ablation result and the comparison. Later weeks will ask why a wronged person accepts a component-complete apology and still doesn’t feel repaired — that question starts from being able to identify, case by case, which component that particular apology was actually resting on.

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