Saturday, September 3, 2011

Week 1 Post 2: Vague and Ambiguous

Vague sentences are not clear and definite in thought. They aren't fully expressed and or understood. In this case only the speaker would fully understand and know what he/she is saying while leaving the listener out of the loop. Earlier this week my friend met a guy and I asked her to tell me about him and all she said was "He was a strange-looking guy." That description of him was so vague because I didn't get to know anything about him and it wasn't detailed enough. "Strange-looking" can be anything depending on how a person view things. I could think that "strange-looking" may be that his hair line is receiving and my friend could of thought that he had bad posture. She should have gave more description about the guy and I would like there too be more information from her response.

Ambiguous sentences are sentences that can interpret into two different meaning. My Comm20 teacher once told me "Woman without her man is nothing," but it can mean two different things depending on how you say it and even by using punctuation. It could mean "Woman, without her man, is nothing," or "Woman, without her man, is nothing."

1 comment:

  1. I think your description of vague sentences was very clear and informative. I like your example of vague sentences. I found it to be quite funny. There are very many possible interpretations of the description “strange-looking” and it was amusing how your friend would use that sentence to describe the boy. When someone describes a person as “strange-looking”, we often want them to elaborate so that we can get a better understanding of what they mean, so hopefully you were able to get a more detailed description from your friend. However, I do not really understand your ambiguous sentence example.

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