Biography
Mary Thompson's involvement in New York City public relations firms spurred her work on how words affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Under leading Semanticists S. I. Hayakawa and Neil Postman Thompson did postgraduate work at New York University. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing, a certification as a teacher of Secondary English, and completed course work in Administration in Higher Education--all with honors.

Through local elections and civic group volunteer work, Thompson experienced the "verbal trench warfare" of the academic and political battlefields. She is convinced of a wide-spread need for individual "word-survival self-defense" education that teaches "word functions."

Believing that word-specific skills were of paramount importance, she taught at The New Lincoln School in New York City, and then at Dallas' Southern Methodist University, where her efforts were recognized with numerous awards.

Word-survival skills, she found, not only helped students with their courses, but also proved invaluable to their personal lives, helping them negotiate, re-define terms, rid themselves of harmful labels, and cope with verbal abuse or misleading "razzle dazzle."

Thompson holds that the absence of semantic know-how is an appalling failure of education. She cites as an example the lack of any reference to semantics as the important element in her own undergrad work when she was selected to read for honors in her major of psychology.

Mary Thompson has long focused on the very skills that everyone needs--whether signing contracts, entering marriage, rearing families or coping with coworkers. With the publication of B.S. Detecting, the benefit of how words affect choices, concerns, and relationships is knowledge that is now readily available.

Author's Work
B.S. DETECTING

Author's Work Offered Online
AMAZON.COM
BARNES&NOBLE.COM