Thinking Critically About Visuals Words Paint a Picture

Thinking Critically About Visuals

Words Paint a Picture

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Describe a time when you were able to “paint a picture” with words, as this professional storyteller is doing with his young audience. Why were you able to use language so effectively? How can we “paint” word pictures more frequently in our everyday lives?

Because language and thinking are so closely related, how well you perform one process is directly related to how well you perform the other. In most cases, when you are thinking clearly, you are able to express your ideas clearly in language. When you have unclear thoughts, it is usually because you lack a clear understanding of the situation, or you do not know the right language to give form to these thoughts. When your thoughts are truly clear and precise, this means that you know the words to give form to these thoughts and so are able to express them in language.

The relationship between thinking and language is interactive; both processes are continually influencing each other in many ways. This is particularly true in the case of language, as the writer George Orwell points out in the following passage from his classic essay “Politics and the English Language”:

• A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly.

Just as a drinker falls into a vicious cycle that keeps getting worse, so too can language and thinking. When your use of language is sloppy—that is, vague, general, indistinct, imprecise, foolish, inaccurate, and so on—it leads to thinking of the same sort. And the reverse is also true: Clear and precise language leads to clear and precise thinking.

The opposite of clear, effective language is language that fails to help the reader (or listener) picture or understand what the writer (or speaker) means because it is vague or ambiguous. Most of us are guilty of using such ineffective language in speech (“It was a great party!”), but for college and work writing, we need to be as precise as possible. And our writing can gain clarity and power if we use our creative-thinking skills to develop fresh, striking figures of speech to illuminate our ideas.