It can be an alienating choice (necessitating numerous violations of the classic creative writing tenet "Show, don't tell") but also a very effective one if your voice requires a certain experimental eeriness.
Suskind wrote that "Tenet and McLaughlin don't remember the meeting very well.
In the book, Suskind writes that Tenet and deputy CIA director John McLaughlin didn't remember the specifics of the meeting in the Oval Office where Tenet supposedly used the phrase.
In an online teaser to the program posted late Thursday, CBSNews writes that Tenet now claims that "the phrase 'slam dunk' didn't refer to whether Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs, says Tenet; the CIA thought he did.
Reading these lines, I thought of the workshops I had taught, which often began with acquiescence to various tenets about writing rather than the impulse to question such accepted wisdom.
And it has always been a tenet of writing that in order to write well and powerfully, you have to descend into yourself, look honestly into your black heart, write what you see there and thus know to be true.
They formed one of 13 tenets written on a chalkboard, scrawled in no particular order.
I use writing to pick apart societal tenets that fascinate me.
Coll wrote that one tenet of Petraeus's command philosophy was constructive opportunism: "One of the keys with counter-insurgency is that every province is a unique case," Petraeus told me.
In his book - the latest in a long line of tomes from former Bush administration officials unhappy in their former jobs - Tenet writes that "I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a 'slam dunk,' a phrase that was later taken completely out of context".
