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Try This 2.12: Locating Words on the Abstraction Ladder

Find a word above (more abstract) and a word below (more concrete) for each of the following words: society, food, train, taxes, school, government, cooking oil, organism, story, magazine.

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Try This 2.13: Distinguishing Abstract from Concrete Words

Make a list of the first 10 words that come to mind and then arrange them from most concrete to most abstract. Then repeat the exercise by choosing key words from a page of something you have written recently.

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4. NATURALIZING OUR ASSUMPTIONS (OVERPERSONALIZING)

It is surprisingly difficult to break the habit of treating our points of view as selfevidently true—not just for us but for everyone. The overpersonalizer assumes that because he or she experienced or believes X, everyone else does, too.

What is “common sense” for one person and so not even in need of explaining can be quite uncommon and not so obviously sensible to someone else. More often than not, “common sense” is a phrase that really means “what seems obvious to me and therefore should be obvious to you.” This way of thinking is called “naturalizing our assumptions.” The word naturalize in this context means we are representing—and seeing—our own assumptions as natural, as simply the way things are and ought to be.

Writers who naturalize their own assumptions tend to make personal experiences and prejudices an unquestioned standard of value. A person who has a nightmarish experience in the emergency room may lead him to reject a plan for nationalized health care, but his writing needs to examine in detail the holes in the plan, not simply evoke the three hours waiting to get seen by a doctor.

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Try This 2.14: Fieldwork: Looking for Naturalized Assumptions

Take a day to research just how pervasive a habit of mind naturalizing assumptions is in the world around you. Start listening to the things people say in everyday conversation. (Lunch lines are a choice site for a little surreptitious overhearing.) Or read some newspaper editorials with your morning coffee (a pretty disturbing way to start the day in most cases). Jot down examples of people naturalizing their assumptions.

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“I Didn’t Know You Wanted My Opinion”

We cannot leave the topic of naturalizing assumptions—assuming our way of seeing the world is the only way—without contemplating the key term at the heart of the subject: opinions. Over the years, those of us who teach have heard our students say a million times, “I didn’t know you wanted my opinion.”

This classic student/teacher miscommunication warrants some analysis. What, in this context, does the word “opinion” mean? You may have already done some thinking on opinions and people’s attitude toward them in the paraphrase × 3 section of this toolkit. There we asked you to paraphrase the assertion “I am entitled to my opinion.” Now let’s pursue the implications (which is what analysis does) of the exclamation—or complaint—“I didn’t know you wanted my opinion.”

Paraphrase #1: You should have told me sooner that it is okay for me to talk about my personal beliefs!

Paraphrase #2: I am pleasantly surprised to find that you are interested in my feelings and experience.

Paraphrase #3: I had not anticipated that you might expect me to say what I think.

Paraphrases 1 and 2 reveal a common but problematic definition of opinion as personal beliefs and feelings. This way of thinking leads to the implicit ground rule that when a teacher asks for personal opinion, students believe they do not need to provide evidence or reasoning. They’re in a “free zone,” which is why another ground rule seems to be that “opinion pieces” should be graded more leniently or not at all.

The problem with this way of understanding opinion is that it assumes our opinions are merely personal. In fact, our opinions are never just our opinions. They are deeply embedded in the conceptual fabric of a culture, and they are always learned.

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