Erard's discovery and ultimate revelation that Mezzofanti, of all people, relied on a method as banal as flash cards might disappoint readers looking for a magic key, but it could spur others to persevere with their own more elementary efforts.
Drumming up support among physicians for the scientific method may seem banal today, but at the end of the nineteenth century it wasn't an easy sell.
The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression.
Russell's method in the novel is so banal and so persistent: he finds a girl whose world has been emptied, he tells her she can be beautiful, and then suddenly he can do whatever he wants.
His method was to listen to the most banal music he could find, something he knew so well that he didn't respond to the lyrics or the melody, and play it over and over.
She refers to the main characters' actions as "infantile and offensive," calls the performances "monotonous," claims that his methods are "instantaneous clichés," and flings around such adjectives as "puerile," "banal," "agonizingly slow," "messy," "erratic," "grotesquely insensitive," and "hideous".
The tension between this director's methods and his intentions — between his exacting, sometimes amazing craft and his resolutely banal ideas — may ultimately be a problem of audience and genre.
It wouldn't be useful for methods sections to become cumbersome behemoths, running into tens of thousands of words of banal details chronicling every minute event, relevant or not.
