A dramatic writing knack I haven't seen discussed is what I'm going to call "the engineering of misunderstanding". It's very vital to a lot of drama--and more so comedies--and you get an ear for the guys that really do it right.

And sometimes you have to just fluff it all and hope you get away with it.

Basically, I'm talking about setups that depend on one person's actions or attitudes being depending on a misunderstanding of another character's actions of speech. The closer they move together, the tougher it is to rig up.

Naturally every screwball comedy or "Lucy" episode has the broad misunderstadings: the half-overheard phonecall, misinterpreted message, etc. I'm talking about something a little more substantial than that.

A masterpiece is seen in an excellent script: Nurse Betty. Betty is under the delusion that she is engaged to the doctor on a TV hospital sitcom and lights out to hook up with him. The closer she gets in--actually finding the hospital in L.A., for instance--the harder it gets for her not to get clued in. Finally she is actually on the shooting set of the show, face to face with the actor, but the writer keeps pulling rabbits out of his hat that enable her illusion to remain intact without straining belief or doing anything too ridiculous or contrived.

When you examine films with this in mind you start seeing many dialogues in which everything has to be excrutiatingly word-for-word in order to avoid having the people tumble to the fact that she's not really shacked up with the Count or he isn't really a fortune hunter or whatever.

A good example of one way such a confrontation is handled is when the dance instructor confront's Baby's father in "Dirty Dancing". Dad says, essentially, "I see an irresponsible womanizer who got his partner pregant, then abandoned her for an innocent younger girl."
All Swayze has to do is say, "Wait a minute, it wasn't ME who knocked her up," and our movie goes down the drain.
Instead, he huffs, "I guess that's what you would see." and stomps off, leaving the fallacious impression.
It's pretty hokey, really, but it flies.

Here's an example of a way such an interaction can get blown to pieces, yet still work, I think: In "Head In The Clouds", Gilda, whose been sleeping with a Nazi asshole, is confronted by the brother of a girl her SS boyfriend torured to death. She says, "You don't understand," and he kills her, a real punch in the gut because the character is about as perfect as you can imagine Theron could make her.
But all she had to do was say, "I was spying on the Nazi. You can check with...." Instead they cut.
Leaving, I would surmise, other who saw it like I was:"Jesus Christ, what a waste; all she had to do was say..."
But perhaps that's the intended effect?

Anyway, the purpose of this is to heighten awareness of such moments and not only the delicacy required to trip through the wires of perception, and some examples of how it can be slam-dunked, finessed, or simply lopped off and let the viewer stew in it.

As design and technology progress--and concepts are very much a part of design and also products of design--it is inevitable that certain elements and concepts get discarded as new ones are adopted. But sometimes you see examples of old, completely useless design parameters hanging on out of intertia. Some might see an example of that in officials in a determinedly non-religious state swearing court witnesses in on the word of "God". One of my favorite examples was the design of the common 35mm SLR film camera during the height of its popularity and sales.

When the SLR first appeared in the thirties and forties, it fell into a common-sense German design that we are familiar with. The lens, shutter and film are all necessary elements and have certain restrictions on their size and relative position to each other. But there was another consideration: the thing had to be machined out of steel. So it shows that machinist mentality in it's design, like the automatic pistol design from the twenties that is still with us today. But at some point they started making cameras out of plastic. At which point, they could just as cheaply be molded into any shape. In fact, Olympus brought out an SLR shaped like a beercan. You grabbed it and raised it to your eye just like drinking a beer or looking into a monocular. All controls were at the fingertips, giving one-hand operation. The wrist was in a natural position, not the contortions necessary to hold the old type of SLR. The design was brilliant and evolutionarily superior in every way. It didn't sell very well. The old machined design stuck around. This could have been because of designers, or because of customers brainwashed into what they think a camera should look like. But the point is, the old, inefficient, needless design stayed around. (Of course digital cameras came along and made most of the original design restrictions obsolete...but most digital cams still look like old viewfinder cameras.)