I call it “what if?” news… so I basically I do the same thing you do, only instead of replacing “could” with “could not”… I just rewrite the sentence to start off with the words “What if”, like this: “What if this could be the holy grail to replace palm oil”.
Replacing “What if” with “IN A WORLD, WHERE…” and then doing in the movie trailer guy’s voice works equally well.
Whenever I see ‘could’ or any other modal verb in a newspaper article, I always reverse the sentence.
‘This could not be the holy grail to replace palm oil’ is equally true.
Journalism is a silly passtime.
Yeah, it’s similar to this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines
I call it “what if?” news… so I basically I do the same thing you do, only instead of replacing “could” with “could not”… I just rewrite the sentence to start off with the words “What if”, like this: “What if this could be the holy grail to replace palm oil”.
Replacing “What if” with “IN A WORLD, WHERE…” and then doing in the movie trailer guy’s voice works equally well.