After going through “See Through Words” for the second time, and after discussing it in class, I definitely saw some of his points differently. At first I really didn’t understand the whole concept of the pseudo-mistakes. It seemed like a waste and not a very effective metaphor creating process. After discussing in small groups and then with the class, I think its actually a really cool way to go about it. Erard doesn’t care if he has to cut a pseudo-mistake because it isn’t working out, because after all it was just a mistake to begin with. Most authors and creators have a hard time letting go of things that they create but by making mistakes on purpose he can dispose of them easy. Mistakes are also helpful because they help us understand why something isn’t working so we can understand a concept better. While making pseudo-mistakes, Erard is learning more and more about the concept he is trying to make a metaphor for, which can help his thought processes while coming up with metaphors.
Glossing the text while I was reading helped because when I came across something I didn’t understand or have never heard of I could just look it up right then and there to understand what I was reading a little bit better. Like I looked up Enron to understand that it was a big bankruptcy scandal in 2001. While glossing the text I also looked up what a psycholinguist’s purpose was. I was curious to see what the main goal of their job was and I found that their main goal is to outline and describe the process of producing and comprehending communication which I thought was really cool.
Great job! Keep it up!