Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [49]
Then shift gears a bit by considering the implications of significant detail in the cover of a high-end magazine such as The New Yorker. First, describe the cover using analytical moves 2 and 3; then consider what the moves imply. You can easily find these covers online either by visiting The New Yorker’s website or by going to the websites of particular artists who regularly produce New Yorker covers. You may have already experimented with a cover by Adrian Tomine in Chapter 2, Try This 2.3. You could look at more of his covers and read for patterns of subject matter and implication. You might also look at the covers of Harry Bliss—such as “Son of Kong,” from August 1, 2005, cover #3632 at The New Yorker cover browser online.
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Implications Versus Hidden Meanings
Two familiar phrases that reveal people’s anxiety toward making the implicit explicit are hidden meanings and reading between the lines. Both phrases imply that meanings exist in places other than the literal words on the page: they are to be found either “under” or between the lines of text.
This is not a wholly unreasonable response because it recognizes that meanings are not always overt. But responding with these phrases does misrepresent the process of making inferences. It can also suggest some skeptical assumptions that a person may hold without fully realizing them. Let’s spell some of these out.
For example, the charge that the meaning is hidden can imply for some people an act of conspiracy on the part of either an author, who chooses to deliberately obscure his or her meaning, or on the part of readers, who conspire to “find” things lurking below the surface that other readers don’t know about and are unable to see. Another implicit assumption is that people probably know what they mean most of the time but, for some perverse reason, are unwilling to come out and say so.
“Reading between the lines” is a version of the hidden meaning theory in suggesting that we have to look for meanings elsewhere than in the lines of text themselves. At its most skeptical, the phrase “reading between the lines” means that an interpretation has come from nothing at all, from the white space between the lines and therefore has been imposed on the material by the interpreter.
Proponents of these views of analysis are, in effect, committing themselves to the position that everything in life means what it says and says what it means. It is probably safe to assume that most writers try to write what they mean and mean what they say. That is, they try to control the range of possible interpretations that their words could give rise to, but there is always more going on in a piece of writing (as in our everyday conversation) than can easily be pinned down and controlled. It is, in fact, an inherent property of language that it always means more than and thus other than it says.
The best evidence for the presence of implication in language itself (not under it or inserted into the white space) can be found by pondering statements that are rich in implication, for their unstated suggestions. We urge you take the time to work through Try This 3.3 below, an exercise demonstrating that implicit meanings are “really there.”
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Try This 3.3: Inferring Implications from Observations
Each of the statements below is rich in implication. Write a list of as many