Persuasion, Interpretation and Metaphors

Long readings are long, but it definitely gave me a lot to think about :).

Well, to start things off, here’s how I interpreted (would this a pun?) the readings: Gross’ article mainly talked about persuasion, Mishra’s talked about picture interpretation and lastly, Lakoff & Johnson’s article talked mainly about the different types of metaphors. 

After looked over the notes I took for each of the articles, I noticed that each one contained “authority” in one way or another:

Gross mentioned that the writer has the authority/role with invention such as citing past papers (either within the body of the text or the reference section) in addition to knowledge sharing. An example would be passing down knowledge from teacher to student because in order to become an authority figure his/her self, one has to learn from other authority figures.

Next, when Mishra stated that pictures are supposed to be more valid than words, I began to think of the discussion of ethos in Gross’s article. I began to wonder that if by thinking of pictures as valid maybe people would give the pictures a type of authority. Because people feel that pictures are supposed to illustrate reality, perhaps that notion is what allows people the faith to rely on the information it seems to contain. Maybe it’s because of that notion of authority that science writers must be careful of the pictures they choose to use because any exaggerated, simplified or out of date picture may also skew the reader’s knowledge despite having words to accompany the pictures.

Toward the end of Lakoff & Johnson’s discussion, I began to think of authority and then based off of Gross’ discussion of student and teacher, I began to wonder about education. More specifically, I began to wonder if people come to definitions or usages of certain words (e.g metaphors) based on what they learn from authority figures (in case anyone who holds and distribute knowledge). For example when we write our profiles of the scientists – we have knowledge of who they are, but people in the class and in our instructor don’t necessarily know who they are yet.

On a second and final point, I want to (try to) tie what all three of these articles mean for us as science writers:

In Gross’ article I feel like the art of persuasion is getting the audience to believe in the knowledge of your piece, and I feel like this applies to researchers and other types of writers as well. When the writer is convinced that the knowledge they’ve come across in their field is worth assimilating within society, they will probably write about it in a way that gives off their feelings. Going off on a little bit of a tangent, I sort of wonder if this could be another place were certainty comes from. If the writer leaves out the “maybes,” “probably’s” and other uncertainties in their writing because they’re sure/satisfied with what they found, than perhaps the reader will have faith in the medium that they read. 

Mishra’s article discussed interpretation of the visuals within a piece of writing. I think this article mainly indicates that as writers we should be wary of what the reader will remember the most. Perhaps the one thing that could stick in their minds is not what we wrote, but is what we chose to display instead. This article discussed how pictures can create false interpretations for the reader in their hunt to pursue knowledge. At first when I read this article, I did wonder if it’s possible to give our readers more simple/precise pictures that can lead them to the same conclusions as the experts in that scientific field. However, that thought only makes me wonder about the types of pictures/diagrams/images that experts prefer vs. what the non-experts prefer. Can the picture looks the same for both groups of people due to their different values? And even if they can look the same, won’t different values/ways of thinking lead to different thoughts regardless?

I found Lakoff & Johnson’s discussion on metaphors to be interesting. I think what stood out to me the most was how different words and their usages in sentences have different meanings in different subcultures and main cultures. It made me think about how we should keep the culture of our main audience in mind. By keeping it in mind as we write, it could help us to better pay attention to our words which could ultimately aid in how we persuade our readers and how our readers will interpret our work.

Before I depart, here is one thing I thought of as I read through Mishra’s piece:

* Are pictures rhetorical? I know that rhetoric deals with language, written and spoken, but if the pictures provoke knowledge construction (whether accurate or not) and then can influence how people interact with other people (e.g pass on that knowledge to others), would that make pictures rhetorical then?