Business Result: Advanced: Student's Book and Online Workbook Pack (+ DVD)

The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally appeared in the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an unusually high (for me) level of factual content. That’s why this book is called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.[2] I want to stress, however, that this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains a lot of “tongue-in-cheek” social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies. I hope you don’t find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If, in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha! Reader Alert The following section, which is mostly about family stuff, contains the article that pretty much launched my writing career: the story of my son’s “natural” birth. When I wrote it back in 1981, Beth and I were living in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, and I had a job teaching effective business-writing seminars.[3] I wrote the article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it got reprinted in many other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, which ended up hiring me. So in a way you could say that I owe my job to my son. Although if you consider the amount of money I wound up spending just on He-Man action figures, I have more than paid him back ...»