Saturday, September 4, 2010

Vague sentences

According to the Mission Critical Website from SJSU the definition of a vague word or sentence is "its meaning is not clear in context." An example I found recently was on a featured news article on Yahoo's homepage. The title of article was "Fewer Workers Wanted Now". This title is quite vague because it is not clear as to what kind of workers are not wanted and also when or where they are least wanted. From just the title readers could assume that this article means that all workers everywhere in the world are not wanted "now" as in at this exact moment today. However when the readers clicks on the article the title is expanded and now reads "Fewer Workers Wanted This Labor Day." This title clears up when and where the workers are least wanted which is not today but on Labor Day and Labor Day is an American holiday so it must be in the United States. But it still does not explain who exactly in the working world will be having a hard time finding a job. Also "fewer" is a vague word. Fewer from what number? The exact number of workers that will not be finding a job cannot be concluded from the word "fewer" alone. People must read the article to find the supporting statistics.  Both of these titles were vague and led people who were not aware of the situation to believe different answers. The author of this article did this purposefully to make people wonder what they were talking about thus making them read the article.

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