Post a proposal essay (750 word minimum) on any one of the following suggestions. Defend your proposal as reasonable. Use your own experience and your own good mind to defend one of the ideas proposed here. People who earn more than $500,000 per year in personal income should have to pay higher taxes than they do now. People who exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet should receive a tax benefit. Southern Nevada should have a professional sports team, even if it means higher local taxes
Professor’s Note: Reader Bias
What is Reader Bias?
Some of us are fair-minded and open-hearted by nature. Others of us are inclined to stick with our teams, and to see things through very specific prisms. These are questions of temperament, and they don’t necessarily say much about reader bias.
In fact, all readers are biased. We cannot help being biased. We live in a particular time, in a particular place, and we have had particular experiences that shape us. In the same way that medieval Europeans could not have imagined a world in which people communicated by cellular telephone, we cannot imagine all the ways that our own ideas might change if we had access to the knowledge and experiences that human beings born six hundred years after us will have.
And yet writing exists over time, and we often read the words of human beings who lived in vastly different worlds than we do. We cannot help but read those words with a different understanding than the original readers had.
It is easy to understand reader bias when we talk about the separation that is created by time, but reader bias also exists among contemporary readers and writers. We understand the words of people who are similar to us – who have had similar experiences, who have similar ideas – more easily than we understand the writing of people very different from us.
Think about the ways that your own life experiences and ideas shape your understanding of the texts you are reading. What ideas are easy for you to consider? What ideas are more difficult? Do your own biases sometimes give you insights into the author’s bias? How might a reader with a very different experience than your own understand the same text?
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