The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures

In class we had learned that the language an author uses helps to persuade the audience. For example, when we read How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldua used her native tongue and English to capture the audience in a specific way that makes her story on a more personal level, and really makes the reader understand her situation by the use of effective language. Words are “baskets of emotion,” and we learned that an effective story has your own personal point of view because that is what draws the reader in. The article, The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures, talked about the levels of language whose purpose is to describe, evaluate, and infer an unknown bias of what is known. It talked about how everyone has their own bias, and will interpret pieces of writing differently because of that bias. Since everyone has their own way of interpreting writing there will always be multiple perspectives. The article gave the example that for one person an idea may be explosive, and to another it may just seem trivial. Everyone will read a piece of writing differently, for no two readers will read (or ignore) the same items.

This article also discussed how pictures are a language, but the pictures “differ radically from oral and written language, and the difference are crucial for understanding.” A single picture usually speaks only to particular things, and is usually limited to “concrete representation.” The picture itself doesn’t present an idea, but we do use language to make the image into an idea. The article talked about using pictures and videos with sound in terms of a newscast. The downside to using a picture is that it can be interpreted in so many different ways that it may not be the way the news wants you to interpret it. However, the use of videos can present an audience with emotion and ideas that the news wants you to feel.