Students sometimes make the following mistake when trying to learn a subject or skill: they move on to new material too quickly, without pausing to reflect on and consolidate old material.

Let’s not make that mistake with these nuance moves. Let’s instead periodically build in some “Nuance Review,” where we connect and compare a recent move with ones we encountered earlier in our Good with Words series.

We’ll start with “if not,” which was one of the nuance moves this week, and two moves that were the nuance moves back in the second week of the first course: “almost” and “even.”

You’ll notice that each of these moves is very similar. So don’t worry if you have a tough time distinguishing them. What’s more important is that you start to recognize when at least one of them might help you better communicate your ideas.

The first example comes from the novel Human Acts by Han Kang, a South Korean writer who won the Man Booker International Book Prize in 2016.

Your hair is cropped short. You are wearing jeans and ultramarine sneakers. The sleeves of your pale gray shirt are just long enough to cover your elbows, and at the top of your back the sweat-soaked fabric has darkened to an inky black. In spite of your androgynous outfit, your small frame and slender neck make you seem delicate, ______ fragile.

The second example comes from a nonfiction book about dolphins by Susan Casey , the former editor-in-chief of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O .

A review in USA Today described the book, which is called Voices in the Ocean , as “painstakingly researched and gorgeously written.” A review in The Guardian came to a similar conclusion: “What starts out as a feel-good, new-agey account darkens like the sunlight diminishing in the deep, subtly turning into a devastating chronicle of one of the most egregious mismatches in natural-human history. The result is a brilliantly written and passionate book.”

Complete the following sentence from the book itself.

After decades of out-of-the-box “participatory research” with dolphins, and quite against the odds, she had forged a prosperous, ____ settled, existence.