Likely, you have heard of a mystery or two that has captured your interest. Mysteries are sometimes as simple as not knowing who ate the last bowl of cereal in your house, or as incredibly complex and serious as the mystery of "D.B. Cooper" (
Between the Lines 11
,
page 120
). Circumstances leading to any suspicious event can be straightforward and predictable, but sometimes they are messy, confusing, utterly bizarre, or totally inexplicable!
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©Thinkstock
On a professional level, solving a "
case
" or mysterious incident can take a long time. Royal Canadian Mounted Police often have investigations that last several years; some become "cold cases" in which all evidence, information, or witnesses have been examined
around the time of the crime. When no new information is available or leads stagnate or disappear, the case may never be solved.
Solving a case depends on investigators' abilities to obtain, analyze, interpret, and filter much data. After exploring all possible "leads" in a case, investigators aim to effectively determine all connections in the evidence that provide a clear idea
of what happened.
Solving mysteries requires critical thinking and skills in problem-solving. As more complicated problems arise, investigations become more complex. Interpreting information in literature and determining what to do in an English 20-2 assignment can lead
to problems just as situations in your own life or work can. In the media study, you gained awareness of techniques that advertisers use in ads to hook consumers, but similar techniques of persuasiveness are found in non-fiction (essays, news articles,
memoirs, etc.), fiction (short stories, plays, novels, etc.), and other types of media (film, Internet, poetry, etc.).
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