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Implication: An Example Now, let’s move on to an example, which will suggest not only how the process of making the implicit explicit works, but also how often we do it in our everyday lives. Imagine you are driving down the highway and find yourself analyzing a billboard advertisement for a brand of beer. Such an analysis might begin with your noticing what the billboard photo contains, its various “parts”—six young, athletic, and scantily clad men and women drinking beer while pushing kayaks into a fast-running river. At this point, you have produced not an analysis but a summary—a description of what the photo contains. If, however, you go on to consider what the particulars of the photo imply, your summary would become analytical.

You might infer, for example, that the photo implies that beer is the beverage of fashionable, healthy, active people. Your analysis would lead you to convert to direct statement meanings that are suggested but not overtly stated, such as the advertisement’s goal of attacking common stereotypes about its product (that only lazy, overweight men drink beer). By making the implicit explicit (inferring what the ad implies) you can better understand the nature of your subject.

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Try This 3.2: Making Inferences

This activity is suitable for in-class writing or small group work or to a longer writing assignment. Locate any magazine ad you find interesting. Ask yourself, “What is this a picture of?” Use our hypothetical beer ad as a model for rendering the implicit explicit. Don’t settle for just one answer. Keep answering the question in different ways, letting your answers grow in length as they identify and begin to interpret the significance of telling details. Ask the implicationquestion: If the picture gives us this, what else is it asking us to believe? Also make sure to ask, after you have done some analysis, the rhetoric-question: “Why did the advertiser choose this particular image or set of images?” This question will help you to think about how the ad has been fashioned for consumption by a particular audience. You might then examine a second advertisement for the same product. Is there a pattern in the way certain items are marketed?

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