When this column took up the grammar of "if"-conditional sentences last week, I emphasized that a good communicator doesn't make bland assertions of truth every time but expresses them simply as ...

One of the things we should avoid as a communicator is to get an unsavory reputation for declaring everything we say as absolute truth. To be a credible, we need a well-developed capacity to ...

Yes, it is correct that we cannot use a contracted negative form when we use inverted word order to express unreal or impossible condition in the past. Instead, we are obliged to use the full form of ...