Blog 1

In “See through words” by Michael Erard, we are enlightened with the idea of metaphors, as well as the designing of metaphors. Throughout this essay, there were quite a few points that stood out to me while reading.

One of the biggest remarks made was on page 5 of the essay, in which Erard talks about his brainstorm sessions with the quote, “a former colleague would always suggest sports metaphors. another guy always had a vehicle metaphor… I told him to buy a new car already”. This section of the essay really stuck out to me, and my interpretation from this is that the subject in the metaphor truly has a greater meaning if it is something the reader enjoys. Like as stated in the quote, one person always would write about sports that could be because, sports relay the most impactful information to them and as writers of these metaphors know they can portray the most successful results because of their interest in that category. Also the point about the man who writes about cars, it is a neat view to see how much daily life can affect your thoughts and ideas. If he would continuously brainstorm ideas of repairment he must be having some issues with his car and therefore the ideas he possessed were geared toward the car.

Another great point that was made was on page six of the essay, with the statement of “to design a metaphor, you have to go beyond what people say they like or don’t like”; and then goes into discussion about how those are emotional responses rather than cognitive, which is the goal of metaphors. I truly agree with this statement because, if we may think of a metaphor, the meaning does not require if we like it or not, but rather its the cognitive processing that gears us to like it or not. How does it relate to us, and how it can be applied to our daily lives are much more impactful questions that would be asked after analyzing a metaphor, rather than just the “I like or dislike” it. If we were to look at it in the form of an analogy, thinking emotionally would be considered “staying inside the box”, where as cognitive processing this would be “looking at the bigger picture” and pulling the true meaning that this metaphor has.

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