In everyday interaction, people recurrently animate, enact, or report on talk. As conversation analysts have shown, reported speech is often deployed in complaint sequences, joking, storytelling, and in moments where some socially delicate matter are to be addressed. In this paper, I examine instances where enactments of hypothetical, non-narrative talk are deployed in the context of modeling desirable stance or conduct. Through examination of segments from academic seminars and performance appraisal interviews in organizations, it is demonstrated how animations of possible talk are used as devices for illustrating proper or improper conduct in contexts that involve orientations to some kind of problematic behavior. Enactments of hypothetical talk (private thought, possible talk in hypothetical scenarios) then serve to illustrate possible, more appropriate conduct, which in turn works to build sequences of modeling or ‘teaching’ co-participants. I demonstrate how enactments of talk or thought serve to facilitate the socially delicate matter of implicitly criticizing the conduct of recipients, and to prescribe normative examples of appropriate or desired conduct. It is argued that modeling talk enactments are one of many resources available for doing implicit criticism and socialization, and that talk enactments are available for performing both explicit and implicit moral work (Drew, 1998) while also attending to the socially delicate nature of such projects.