Identifying Identifying Inference, Tone, and Inference, Tone, and

Bias Bias (or, being good social detectives)(or, being good social detectives)

Reading Strategies Workshop

• An inference is a logical solution or outcome developed by examining evidence for patterns.

• The evidence comes from the author’s words, sentences, and paragraphs.

How do we make them?

• Are figured out by being good social detectives….

• http://www.philtulga.com/Riddles.html

1. Activate prior knowledge– it will influence what we infer2. List the topic, main idea, and supporting details– they define what we are allowed to infer3. Identify and explain the purpose– it guides what we infer4. Beware bias and generalizations– yours and the author’s!5. Check out the tone by looking at

a. Denotations and connotationsb. Subjectivity and objectivityc. Positivity and negativityd. Literal and figurative language (similes/metaphors/personification, hyperbole/irony)

• A good inference will account for all known facts or details.

InferenceInference

DetailDetail

DetailDetail

DetailDetail

DetailDetail

• You should be able to discard some inferences when the author provides new information.

• Prior knowledge is often required to understand jokes, riddles or comedy sketches.

• For example, can you answer this children’s riddle?

How do you keep an elephant from charging?

Take away his credit cards.•To “get” the joke, you need prior knowledge about charge cards and wild elephants; and that it’s silly for an elephant to have a charge card.•Your prior knowledge is what makes the joke funny. If you don’t have the knowledge, you don’t get the joke.

• In groups of two, think of classroom-appropriate jokes and determine what prior knowledge a person has to have to “get it.”

• More sophisticated jokes, like comedy sketches on Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show, often depend on detailed prior knowledge.

• Prior knowledge is good for more than jokes. It also helps you understand a reading.

• Prior knowledge plays a crucial role in drawing inferences.

• Sometimes your prior knowledge, especially beliefs, might conflict with information the author is presenting.

• You’ll need to suspend your belief for a while and concentrate on the author’s ideas.

Experienced Experienced Readers Have Readers Have Learned . . .Learned . . .

The inferences that you build must be based on the evidence presented in the reading – not on your beliefs.

In other words, even if your author demonstrates a

bias…implied or not…to fully understand the reading, you must leave your own bias “at the door.” (sad, but true, the author cares not what you think…)

• A generalization is a type of inference.

• A generalization is a statement that encompasses all examples, types, or other details the author presents.

• Sometimes the author doesn’t directly state the main idea – instead you have to infer the main idea.

• Use annotations and/or an outline to mark the topic, list the details, then infer what the main idea must be.

Search for the topic

Find the major supporting details

Look for patterns among the details

Generalize from details

Combine generalizations with topic to derive the implied thesis statement

• P = Persuasive

• I = Informative

• E = Expressive

1. Read the title and subheadings.

2. Consider the source and the genre.

3. Notice the author’s tone.

Inferring is much like

predicting….

And often the clue to solving the mystery comes from

tone…

• Denotation: Think “d”, dictionary. The literal meaning of the word.

• Connotation: Think “conn”, connections. The association of the word to emotions or attitudes.

• Connotations suggest subjective tone.• Subjective means the author is placing

himself/herself into the writing as one of the subjects.

• A lack of connotation suggests the reading is objective or factual.

• Objective means the author is ignoring opinions and focusing on the object of the writing – the facts or ideas.

• Connotations can be positive or negative.

• Knowing the polarity of the connotations can help you understand the author’s tone.

• An adjective’s job is to state the characteristics of a person, place, thing, or idea.

• Adjectives can show the degree of intensity with which the author describes ideas and events.

• Working in groups of two, list three to five adjectives of increasing intensity for each of the items on the next slide.

• For example, if the slide said “cleanliness of a room” you could answer “disgusting – dusty – clean – sparkling – sanitized.”

Are connotations present?

Are connotations present?

SubjectiveSubjective

Are connotations positive or negative?

Are connotations positive or negative?

How intense are connotations?

How intense are connotations?

ObjectiveObjective

yes no

• In order to talk in class about an author’s ideas, you need to use words that describe the author’s tone more specifically.

• A few examples are on the next slide..

Negative Neutral Positive

alarmed balanced amused

angry denotative appreciative

annoyed factual blessed

apathetic impartial celebratory

bitter informative cheerful

cynical just elated

desperate matter-of-fact excited

• Figurative language – including similes, metaphors, personifications, and hyperbole – has a subjective tone.

• Literal language, which often appears in the form of facts, has an objective tone.

Are connotations or figurative language present?

Are connotations or figurative language present?

SubjectiveSubjective

Are connotations positive or negative?Are connotations

positive or negative?

How intense are connotations?

How intense are connotations?

ObjectiveObjective

yes no

What type of figurative language is being used?What type of figurative language is being used?

For Figurative Language . . .For Figurative Language . . .For Connotations . . .For Connotations . . .

• Simile: An indirect comparison of two things using the words “like” or “as.”

• Metaphor: A direct comparison of two things without using the words “like” or “as.”

Me without a mic is like a beat without a snare . . . I'm sweet like licorice, dangerous like syphilis.

-- Lauryn Hill, “How Many Mics”

Like a flowerWaiting to bloomLike a lightbulb In a dark room I'm just sitting here waiting for you…

-- Norah Jones

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull. -- H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

I look at you and wham, I'm head over heels. I guess that love is a banana peel.

-- Bud Weisman and Fred Wise, “I Slipped I Stumbled, I Fell”

• Personification is the act of giving an inanimate object characteristics of an animate being.

Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the cherubic color, the color of Heaven's gates. . . . Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with attitude.

-- Tom Robbins, "The Eight-Story Kiss." Wild Ducks Flying Backward.

There is unrest in the forest,There is trouble with the trees,For the maples want more sunlightAnd the oaks ignore their pleas.

-- Rush, “The Trees”

• Hyperbole is intentional exaggeration to make or emphasize a point. Hyperbole is meant to be taken figuratively, not literally.

• She sent so many text messages, her thumbs fell off.• He watched so much television that

you could see “Lost” reruns when you looked into his eyes.• Hyperbole is, without a doubt, the

single greatest writing tool in the history of the universe.

• Irony is the use of words or images to express the opposite of what is said.

1. Verbal irony: The words used have an unexpected meaning.

2. Situational irony: What happens is unexpected or is the opposite of our expectations.

3. Dramatic irony: The audience or reader knows more about what is going on that the character does.

• Create– Two similes for daylight

– Two metaphors for love

– Two statements containing hyperbole dealing with school

– Two ironic statements about the economy

General Purpose General Tone

Inform Objective

Express Subjective

Persuade Subjective

Subjective

• To express or persuade.

• Usually several connotations and/or figurative language.

• Author creates emotional states.

• Caution: Subjective writing may still include facts and information!

Objective

• To inform.

• Few connotations with fewer degrees of intensity.

• Author help readers understand with their minds.

Let’s Practice!• “Hal and Me…”

Let’s Practice!1. “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you

stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

Let’s Practice!2. I can feel it too. Over the last few years I’ve had an

uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going---so far as I can tell but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article. My mind would get caught up in the twists of the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Let’s Practice!3.I think I know what’s going on. For well over a decade now, I’ve

been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web’s been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or the pithy quote I was after. I couldn’t begin to tally the hours or the gallons of gasoline the Net has saved me. I do most of my banking and lots of my shopping online. I use my browser to pay my bills, schedule my appointments, book flights and hotel rooms, renew my driver’s license, send invitations and greeting cards. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s data thickets---reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, following Facebook updates, watching video streams, downloading music, or just tripping lightly from link to link to link.

Let’s Practice!• 4. The Net has become my all-purpose medium, the

conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich and easily searched store of data are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “Google,” says Heather Pringle, a writer with Archaeology magazine, “is an astonishing boon to humanity, gathering up and concentrating information and ideas that were once scattered so broadly around the world that hardly anyone could profit from them.” Observes Wired’s Clive Thompson, “The perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking.”

Let’s Practice!5.The boons are real. But they come at a price. As

McLuhan suggested, media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

1. Activate prior knowledge– it will influence what we infer2. List the topic, main idea, and supporting details– they define what we are allowed to infer3. Identify and explain the purpose– it guides what we infer4. Beware bias and generalizations– yours and the author’s!5. Check out the tone by looking at

a. Denotations and connotationsb. Subjectivity and objectivityc. Positivity and negativityd. Literal and figurative language (similes/metaphors/personification/hyperbole/irony)