An excellent Twitter thread about a short sentence authored by Hemingway, and what we’re prone to assume, and why (click the date for the thread):
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Hemingway’s infamous six-word is supposed to be micro-fiction. However it doesn’t tell a story; it asks people to infer one. Indulge my curiosity here. What did you infer happened?— John Wiswell (@Wiswell) January 2, 2019
@Wiswell suggests that we “fill in the blanks” of what happened in this six-word microfiction, and that the overwhelming presumption seems to be that the baby died, the shoes were never worn, and the grieving parents gave the shoes away. As other respondents point out in the thread, it could just as easily be that someone grew out of the shoes before wearing them, or wore them to tatters (we don’t, after all, hear about the condition of the shoes), or even that it was a wedding gift to a couple that never conceived.
In general parlance, we might call this a process of closure: that is, we fill in the blanks based on what we already (socially and culturally) know. In visual language, we might call this ellipsis, which as with warrants, demands a certain level of engagement from the reader. For example:
In the comic above, probably you assumed that this is what happened in the white space between the panels: the man wielding the axe killed the man cowering and screaming “No!” But who’s to say that there wasn’t a struggle, the would-be victim wrested the axe away, and killed his would-be killer?
We often make our inferences based on what seems like the most straightforward reasoning, and what we think is the most straightforward reasoning is often based on our personal, social, and cultural experience and knowledge. In academic writing, writers use what’s called warrants as the principle that connects their reasoning to their claim(s). When we presume an audience, we presume that certain warrants can go unstated and remain implicit: for example, “There’s 2 feet of snow outside. Campus is closed” has a “missing sentence,” one that thoroughly explains, “That much snow on the ground won’t melt quickly; campus isn’t equipped to clear it before the end of the day; and it will be unsafe for staff and students to operate in those conditions.”
Why isn’t that sentence stated? Because we assume our audience understands it as general knowledge and doesn’t need it spelled out! Social and cultural knowledge also informs what we infer around identity politics and pop culture (i.e., sometimes you have to have seen a movie to “get it”).
You’ll find in our academic essays, we often need to spell these reasons out, and when we don’t, it looks manipulative, asking a reader to agree with your claims without seeing how your reasoning takes you from evidence to argument. As we move forward in our writing tasks, be mindful of where you allow your warrants to go unstated, where “the missing sentence” is most important, and where heightened specificity might resolve a lot of problems for readers who aren’t in the know.
