A Non-Simple View of Ambiguity
On seductive inferences from simple words
Ambiguity can be treacherous for writers who strive to communicate their understanding of facts. Such writers harbor a righteous fear of hidden ambiguity on important points in their public discourse because it can damage not only their immediate message, but also the confidence their readership might have in their past and future writing. A key challenge in this genre is to minimize the threat.
Ambiguity, on the other hand, can be lovely in poetry, in novels, in plays, in films. A few weeks ago, I read Where the Crawdads Sing and then watched the film. I have to say I loved them both because I could feel the bittersweet ambiguity of Kya’s life as poor white trash, an abandoned child in the marshlands of North Carolina in a racist, sexist, and stratified community set against her nobility as a naturalist, a survivalist, a scientist, and a poet who learns to read and write and publish without formal schooling. A young friend whom she eventually marries teaches her in the wild.
Ambiguity can be treacherous for readers in search of evidence and fact even with a trusted writer. Every text carries some ambiguity; readers are responsible for managing it charitably as part of the agreement to co-create meaning. “The boy ran out of the woods with tears in his eyes and tears in his coat”—I’ve used this example time and again over the years. Phonics ain’t going to help you here. You need sentence comprehension. This example complicates any simple view by illustrating just one obvious way that decoding and comprehension are not separate, but complementary.
Ambiguity can be a powerful weapon in the hands of charlatans, those characters who weave tangled webs when at first they set out to deceive. “I didn’t even know him,” said Donald Trump, referring to the White supremacist Nazi dinner guest at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks ago. “Know” in Trump’s mouth comes wrapped in layers of ambiguity that render close reading essential. True, you need to know about silent K. But you need to know about the sneaking Don, too. The silent K means nothing without sentence comprehension and world knowledge. You try your best, you “know” that he “knew,” but your knowledge is not to be found in his words even if they were phonetically regular. Orthography and lexical knowledge are insufficient; semantic knowledge brings you closer to his intention.
It’s so simple, eh? Decoding plus Comprehension equals reading? This is real life we are discussing—real children, real teachers, real citizens, real scientists. The goal is college and career readiness.
How do we square a responsible reading of “I didn’t even know him” with the “simple view of reading”? What does decoding mean when a sentence has been double coded to double cross? What happens to mature readers when their early induction years into reading were informed by a simple view of the simple view of reading? Decoding + comprehension = reading? What happens when the induction years of teachers are informed by the simple view of teaching?
Let’s have a comment festival where we create a Goughian phrase for teaching. X + Y = teaching. Chime in with a thought bubble below. We can vote on the best phrase and then write an ltRRtl community post.
I’m out on a limb here, but my ambiguity alert flashes when I see that Phil Gough tinkered with his simple phrase over time. He started phrasing it “decoding + comprehension = reading,” later changed it to “decoding + linguistic comprehension = reading,” and then explained that by linguistic comprehension, he meant comprehension of “reading and auding” [emphasis added]. In his published text “auding” has a footnote kicking me out of his text to an appendage. Why didn’t he simply write “decoding + reading + listening = reading”? I think I know why. It doesn’t add up. Here’s the clincher from Hoover and Gough (1990):
Does this passage not acknowledge that reading is, as it turns out, not simple at all? How am I misunderstanding it? Why is it important to divide complexities into two equal parts? Why not three? four?
In a prepublication copy of an upcoming chapter, Pearson, Madda, and Raphael (in press)1 point out a simple fact about the original phrasing of SVR that actually concurs with Hoover and Gough (1990) on one unambiguous point—reading IS complex. Hallelujah! The Simple View is not Simple. Before I present a quote from their chapter, I must first present you with a note from the authors urging you to read this quote tentatively, provisionally, until we all have access to the larger context in which it will appear. Provisional reading—how simple is that?
That said, here is the quote:
Pearson, P. D.; Madda, C. I., & Raphael, T. E. (in press). Current issues and best practices in literacy instruction. In L. M. Morrow, E. Morrell, & H. Casey, Best practices in literacy instruction (7th edition), Guilford Press.