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Avowing a 'paranormal' experience might jeopardize a speaker's rational status. We compared such tellings with two sorts of non-paranormal events. One sample was a set of solicited, interview accounts and the other was a set of stories told in the run of spontaneous conversations. In general the results confirmed that paranormal tales did attract the 'normalizing' devices previously found (by Wooffitt, 1992): oblique referencing and 'I was just doing X when Y...' phrases and the avoidance of naming the event. (On a minor note, we also note the possibility that the positioning of laughter might be a normalizing device.) There were, however, illuminating cases where stories which were not paranormal nevertheless featured 'normalizing' devices in their telling. The analysis of these reminds us that whether a story needs normalizing or not is up to speakers, not analysts. Paranormality is just one case where the speaker makes his or her story play on appearance and reality and so affords room for normalization
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AVERY et al. (1997) studied this question.
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