Have you ever jumped to a conclusion, or a judgment, only to discover later that the conclusion was completely different from what you first expected? Watch the clerk in this video jump to a wrong conclusion.

Source: Caltex commercial (w Charles Bud Tingwell) [2000], GrubcoTV3, YouTube

The clerk first believed that the woman’s cart was squeaking but found out later that her shoes were squeaking instead. Jumping to conclusions can sometimes result in an embarrassing situation.

Source: take a step back, Fabio Venni, Flickr

In the play you will study in this lesson, you will discover some characters who jump to conclusions. Reading a play is very different from reading a short story or novel. Instead of having long passages of description about characters and setting, all of the action of the play is told through dialogue and stage directions.

In this lesson, you will be able to use textual evidence to draw your own conclusions about characters in works of drama, and you will learn how to explain a playwright’s use of dialogue and stage directions.

Source: Floral dialogue, Gwendal Uguen, Flickr