unemphatic

Character and plot are stripped to the bone, the former presented to us entirely through mundane actions, with no attempt at "psychological realism" (thus we never really get to "know" Carver's characters, we just watch them wandering through their lives), the latter flattening out Freytag's triangle to an unemphatic succession of events.

Writing and Publishing 2010

This had some quiet patches – a pigeon dish that was a little unemphatic, lamb that also seemed polite – but at its best is truly exceptional.

Restaurant: Gauthier Soho, London W1 John Lanchester 2010

He asked, making his voice unemphatic, hardly interested:

She Closed Her Eyes 2010

Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "For me, a little of this unemphatic, anti-dramatic naturalism goes a pretty long way - I'm still hoping for an entire movie by Hou as impassioned and beguiling as the lovely first section of his last feature, Three Times."

GreenCine Daily: Cannes. The Flight of the Red Balloon. 2007

For those few years Joy and I feasted on love, every mode of it – solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers.

The Reverent Heart Heidi Hess Saxton 2008

For those few years Joy and I feasted on love, every mode of it – solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers.

Archive 2008-09-01 Heidi Hess Saxton 2008

The unemphatic versions are I shall, you will, he will, etc.

"People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with." Ann Althouse 2008

Far away, distant, beautiful, irrelevant, from out of a little cluster of secondhand bookshops, ecclesiastical residences, and the inns and incidentals of a decaying market town, the cathedral of Lowchester pointed a beautiful, unemphatic spire to vague incredible skies.

In the Days of the Comet Herbert George 2006

I hesitated, I saw nothing in her past to fit her for that work; but in a week or two she brought a translation of some heroic tale, what tale I cannot now remember, in the dialect of the neighbourhood, where one discovers the unemphatic cadence, the occasional poignancy of Tudor English.

Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume III Autobiographies W.B. Yeats 1965

I hesitated, I saw nothing in her past to fit her for that work; but in a week or two she brought a translation of some heroic tale, what tale I cannot now remember, in the dialect of the neighbourhood, where one discovers the unemphatic cadence, the occasional poignancy of Tudor English.

Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume III Autobiographies W.B. Yeats 1965