An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language: Learn to Hear What’s Left Unsaid (Bad Arguments)

Using examples of loaded language, Ali Almossawi shows how words can be and are scored and arranged to influence the reader’s emotions, opinions, and reasoning. Accompanying the text and illustrating the cited examples are exquisite pen drawings of rabbits and badgers, along with other pets, that strongly remind one of Beatrix Potter’s drawings. The animals substitute for any parties that may be associated with the practices that illustrate how language is often used to influence the perception of personality or events through vagueness, biases, misdirection, and other techniques that mask the correct details.

There are a wealth of examples that exposed this reader to an Alice in Wonderland-like experience of bewilderment and amazement at the myriad ways news reports, advertisers, politicians, and anyone else can exploit language and befuddle the reader. Clearer directions for strategies to recognize the manipulative operations that employ language as weapons for mind control and ways to offset the damage would be helpful. This book should be required reading for all students, with more examples of the practice of using “loaded language” to twist words into distorted sense, along with the processes required for correction.