Objective Language

While humans are emotional creatures, a speaker can reassure an audience that they are avoiding bias and value judgements by using objective language.

Introduction

Objective language should be accurate and transparent in its communication of ideas.

To convince listeners that they are presenting a fair argument, a speaker should avoid value judgements, qualify their opinions, and provide evidence to support their claims.

Understanding Bias

We are all biased. Depending on where and when we grew up, the schools we were enrolled in, and the cartoons we watched as children, some things will always seem better than others to each of us.

This is not usually a problem, and we embrace emotion and opinion all the time in our everyday interactions with others. However, when we become emotional we do tend to lose our perspective on the true state of things.

Again, this is not in itself a problem: if something is of little consequence to ourselves or others then there is little harm in indulging our personal bias.

That said, sometimes the consequences of bias can cause significant harm. This harm could be to ourselves, to others, or to the natural world.

Given this, it follows that we should remain objective when it comes to making decisions of consequence.

In addition, when we need to assure listeners that we are not presenting a biased argument, we should stick to objective language.

Using Objective Language

So, how can we make sure that we are using objective language?

First of all, we should avoid value judgements.

As mentioned, we are all biased. However, when it comes to being objective, we should avoid judging things based on these biases. Instead, we should attempt to evaluate things using transparent criteria.

How can we achieve this? Well, suppose we want to describe the weather using one of the following statements:

Which of these statements is more objective?

Dramatic music

The answer is The weather is sunny.

This is because the first statement (The weather is lovely) is making a value judgement. That is, it is using a criteria that not everyone can agree on (what I think is lovely weather may be very different to what you think is lovely weather).

However, we can consider the statement The weather is sunny to be objective because it is easier to agree on whether or not a day is sunny (either the sun is shining or it isn't).

Let's see if we can complicate things a little further—is the following statement objective?

Hmmm.

This statement is not strictly objective because it presents an opinion rather than an impartial observation. That said, while this is an opinion, at least the speaker acknowledges their bias by opening their statement with I think...

Interpreting literary texts

In English classes we spend much of our time interpreting literary texts, but how can we communicate our interpretations of these texts using objective language?

Well, the trick is to avoid making value judgements using words such as good or bad. Instead, we can use terms such as effective or ineffective to argue that a text is successful in achieving its intended purpose.

In addition, we must use specific textual examples to support our claims, otherwise our audience will not be convinced by our unsubstantiated claims.

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Subjective Language