The second time I read Erard’s writing on metaphors, I found that I really understood the specific examples he provides throughout his reading far better than the first. The most helpful part of my better understandings were the group activities we did in class the same day. I found that most of what I was highlighting and annotating were from the questions being asked in class. This helped a lot because the points I highlighted before were mainly just the basic topics on metaphors and a quick summary on each paragraph, but the second time reading, I found that I was able to go much more in depth to solve the questions we did in class and achieve a better understanding on the entirety of the reading itself.

One of the topics I understood more were the pseudo-mistakes. When I first read this, I didn’t really understand what he was talking about at all and skimmed through that passage. However, after talking with group members in class, I understood the second time reading that these pseudo-mistakes were used to generate a list of metaphors to narrow it down to the best one. That made sense why Erard chose the word pump to relate to the paintbrush. I also recognized the “evidence is a weapon” line that was mentioned in class that I didn’t highlight the first time. I realized if one can use a metaphor in their debate, it can get many others on board with their specific argument.

One of the other main topics Erard talked about a lot were the “windows and doors that frame toward the reality outside”. This was another point I didn’t quite perceive strongly on my first reading, but after discussing it with classmates and rereading it, I know now that these people who create metaphors have the power to move this metaphorical window around to show people a certain aspect of the outside world that many weren’t familiar with.

Finally, one word I noticed that was still unfamiliar when I was glossing the text the second time was the word semantic which was used in the line “The richness of the semantic resources that a designer built-on biases and preferences” … “block certain kinds of understandings”. After looking it up, I realized this line was saying that you can strengthen the language in your metaphor so much that it may permanently stick with that person and their opinion on other perspectives is “blocked” as their mind is only set on one idea simply because of a metaphor.