Now, I commit these two "critical thinking sins" constantly in my papers (or at least my high school English teacher used to always say that).
As far as being ambiguous goes, I look at ambiguous as trying to examine a certain topic that doesn't necessarily have one appropriate answer or solution. In my high school honors English class 2 years ago, we would often discuss in our socratic seminars about how some of our readings were often ambiguous and didn't have one specific answer. I recall reading this one short story in an anthology by author Bessie Head, and there was an entire class debate over a characters motivation for wanting to murder her husband. There were several ideas that all correlated with one another but none of them pointed specifically to one definite answer. We at one point had about 5 different opinions and 5 different scenarios, and all of them were equally possible. I personally enjoy the use of ambiguity because it gives a certain level of freedom to the reader/critical thinker for interpretation. In certain circumstances ambiguity is not good, because if you are searching for a specific answer, its not as easy to decipher.
I think in casual conversation we can all be vague. Being vague is like trying to act out a contentless scene; there is nothing to work with! In acting, we use contenless scenes to help build some improvisational skills as well as to introduce the new actor to the stage. A contentless scene contains lines that are very vague and the actors can build whatever scenes they wish based on the lines given, and each can be completely different and it is based completely on interpretation.
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3 comments:
I love your example of vague and being ambiguous, you make it seem positive that authors use these "critical thinking sins" in their writing and i do agree with you that it makes reading it better because there is a lot of room for our own interpretation. One thing I dislike about being ambiguous in writing is only when you need to know exactly what is going on to understand the next scene, that is when our own interpretation gets the story confusing.
I also like how you shine a positive light on being vague by using example of acting and it gives you room to improvisation. You post have helped me understand more about these two terms better than from the book. Good job!!
Your blog on an ambiguous claim is very insightful. I did not think of the positives to stating an ambiguous claim. I only thought of such claims as being a headache and time consuming. I can see how they would be helpful now, especially for in class discussions. I guess it would be boreing to have a straight forward claim all of the time because everyone would always arrive at the same conclusion. With the lack of ambiguous claims we would only hear one answer and not the diversity of opinion. Although I must admit, when I am trying to get driving directions, please just give me something straight forward lol.
Nice post! It made me remember that the biggest problem I've had when writing papers was being vague so whoever read them could not get the point I was trying to make.
I agree with you with the use of ambiguity in stories. Sometimes, it's overbearing having the author tell the reader what happens to the character to the point that the reader can't make up their own interpretation of that character.
It's nice to see a positive side to ambiguous and vague sentences.
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