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Persuasion in Specialized Discourse: A multidisciplinary perspective
Edited by Chiara Degano, Dora Renna and Francesca Santulli
[Argumentation in Context 22] 2024
► pp. 211–231

Chapter 10
Teaching to manage implicit linguistic meanings

The state of the art and future perspectives

| Università di Roma Tre
| Università di Roma Tre
Conveying information implicitly can reduce epistemic vigilance and critical attention. Commercial advertising and political propaganda often exploit this property of linguistic implicitness to covertly convey questionable content, leading to the manipulation of their audience. This highlights the necessity of educating individuals to recognize implicit content and to critically engage with it, a practice that has not been sufficiently emphasized thus far. The paper provides a survey of (i) the primary theoretical and experimental studies on the subject and (ii) some educational resources and materials currently available to the public in Europe, aimed at enhancing awareness regarding the cognitive and social ramifications of implicit information transmission, particularly through the media. The paper also offers (iii) specific didactic proposals based on the authors’ research and teaching experiences.
Keywords: manipulation through implicitness, education on public communication, TV platforms, online resources, teaching critical attention
Article outline
  • 1.Implicitness as a persuasion device
  • 2.Research on education about implicit communication
  • 3.Educational resources
    • 3.1Research projects and Observatories
    • 3.2Public Service Platforms
      • 3.2.1BBC Bitesize
      • 3.2.2Rai Scuola
      • 3.2.3Lumni
      • 3.2.4General results of the overview
    • 3.3Some ideas to increase awareness about implicit meanings
      • 3.3.1Comprehension
      • 3.3.2Production
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aic.22.10giu
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