He means to persuade — or, at least, to subtly reroute the grooves of reasoning by which his wary readers arrive at their reliably liberal positions.
If some high-minded, plagiarism-wary reader had persuaded S. E. Hinton to remove all references to the books and movies that inspired her, "The Outsiders" probably wouldn't have slipped past the internal (let alone official) censors that governed '60s adolescence.
But painting the working-class, Boston-raised green power advocate too clean makes the reader wary, for no good reason.
That has some prospective readers wary.
"The European Economy Since 1945" should make readers wary of universal prescriptions for economic policy, since it shows how the fit between policies and circumstances is clearly more important than the nature of either in isolation.
Advertisers have had a hard time figuring out how to reach people on their phones, he said, because TV and Web ads do not work well on phones and advertisers are wary of assaulting readers on such a personal device.
When a catcher wants to tell a pitcher what to throw, he uses his fingers, ticking off a secret code; more expansive discussions require a walk to the mound, where players cover their mouths with hands and gloves, wary of lip readers.
Skeptical readers are wary of the business press, which blew air into faux companies and created heroes out of people who were really criminals.
Wary, perhaps, of taxing readers' patience, he finishes his tour in three hundred pages, resisting what must have been an overwhelming urge to interrupt the narrative with disco-graphical digressions.
"I have devoted half a century, my entire academic life, to the project, in a dozen books and hundreds of articles tackling various pieces of the puzzle, without managing to move all that many readers from wary agnosticism to calm conviction," he writes, in "From Bacteria to Bach and Back".
Your letter brought up a very interesting point: there are literally millions of folks out there who have never seen an e-reader and wary of its deficiencies.
