Reading 2.3

In Reading 2.3, I learned about “Language”. There are 3 kinds of imprecision in language which is vagueness, over generality and ambiguity. In my understanding, vagueness means fuzziness or inexact. As an example, we often heard the words “minimum requirement” – it is vague because it does not indicate how well or what kind or requirement needed for things to operate. Over generality has almost the same meaning with vague but over general provide unspecific or too broad of information in a given context. Let say, “Where are you going?” and the answer is “Out.” Ambiguity refers to a doubtful sense of a word or phrase because many words have more than one meaning. Ambiguities that result from faulty grammar are called syntactical ambiguities. There are four types of definitions – Stipulative definition, persuasive definition, lexical definition and précising definition. There are six ways strategies on defining which is ostensive, enumerative, definition by subclass, etymological, synonymous and definition by genus and difference. In this chapter, I learned about euphemism usage as political correctness in context. As an example, “passing away” referring death. Death is a harsh word and passing away is more polite or comforting word to take place the word death.

Reading 2.1

This article, Battling the Bullies is focusing on fighting to overcome bullying activities at school and some solution to overcome. The article also wrote a story about a student who suffering stomach pain and always begging his mother to let him stay home from school. The student lastly found out suffering from bullying activities. This article is clearly written to parents who have children in school, the students and who are in educational profession. Besides the story of the suffering student, this article also written to advise how to overcome the bullies. The writer seems to condemn the bullies’ activities and she also describes the bullies as the villains because of their destructive behavior. I would say the impact to the readers is likely to be successful because the all people who involve are together fighting the bullies. The visual aspects of the text are significant because to show the victim of the bullies is students as appeared picture and the large font size of the headline shows the bullies cases are serious.