HSH1000 Chap.2 What Words Do: Statements, Definitions and Genres
What Words Do: Statements, Definitions and Genres
Three things a sentence can be doing
The course-long attention to language starts with a sorting exercise: decide what a sentence is doing before deciding whether it is right. A description claims the world is a certain way and is settled by an observation. A prescription claims something ought to be done or valued and is settled only by an argument.
A prediction claims the world will be a certain way and is settled by waiting. A definition proposes how a word will be used, and is neither true nor false, only useful or misleading.
The reason this matters is not tidiness. Each kind is settled by different evidence, so mislabelling one lets it borrow credibility it has not earned.
The commonest slide in student writing moves from a true count to a recommendation that appears to follow from it, and naming the slide tells you exactly what is missing: a premise about what makes something worth doing.
Real prose rarely supplies one clean kind per sentence, so the first move is usually to split a sentence before judging it.
What a dictionary can and cannot settle
One Meeting 1 outcome is to look a word up and to understand that the Oxford English Dictionary is descriptive rather than prescriptive. A descriptive dictionary records how a word has been used, with dated evidence.
It cannot end an argument about what a word ought to mean in your essay.
When a disagreement stalls because a word has a blurred edge, what unblocks it is a precising definition that names where you are putting the line and why; when you need a technical sense the language does not supply, you stipulate, and are then bound by your own stipulation.
A genre label is a claim
Classification decides which features of a text count as achievements and which count as faults.
Call a text a report and its lack of characterisation is appropriate; call the same text a story and the same absence is thin. Nothing in the text changed. Several set texts genuinely straddle categories, and the controlled answer is not to pick one and suppress the others but to say which reading you are using for which claim.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Describing, prescribing and predicting, and what settles each
- 02
The slide from a description to a recommendation
- 03
Lexical, precising and stipulative definitions
- 04
A descriptive dictionary and what it cannot decide
- 05
Genre as a set of reader expectations
- 06
Texts that straddle categories, and how to handle them
Unsticking a disagreement about one word
- 1Show that the two students are not contradicting each other.
- 1Say why looking the word up will not settle it.
- 1Write a precising definition and state what it changes.
Key terms
- Descriptive Statement
- A sentence claiming that the world is a certain way, settled by an observation, a count or a document.
- Prescriptive Statement
- A sentence claiming that something ought to be done or valued. No amount of counting settles it, because its support has to be an argument about what is worth doing.
- Predictive Statement
- A sentence claiming that the world will be a certain way, confirmed or refuted by what later happens.
- Precising Definition
- A definition that sharpens an edge ordinary use leaves blurred, by naming where the line is being put and why.
- Stipulative Definition
- A definition that announces how a word will be used in this piece of writing, binding the author for the rest of it.
- Genre Expectation
- The set of features a reader assumes in advance once a text is classified, which decides what will count as a fault in it.
What Words Do: Statements, Definitions and Genres FAQ
How do I tell a prescription from a description in a mixed sentence?
Split the sentence at the connective and test each half separately. Ask what observation would settle it. If no observation could, that half is prescribing, however factual it sounds. The council should have asked, and everyone knew it does both jobs in nine words, and only the second half can be checked.
Is the Oxford English Dictionary the authority for this course?
It is the tool the Meeting 1 outcome names, and it records how words have been used rather than legislating how they should be. That makes it decisive for a dispute about established use and useless for a dispute about where to draw a line, which is what most seminar arguments are really about.
Can I invent my own definition of a term?
You can stipulate one, provided you announce it and then stay inside it. A stipulation is a proposal rather than a claim, so it cannot be false, but it can be misleading if it quietly departs from the sense everyone else is using. Announcing it is what protects you.
Does calling a text a thought experiment let it off the hook?
It rules out one line of objection and opens another. You cannot then complain that the setting is implausible, because implausibility is the method: the case is built to isolate a variable. You can still argue that the variable being isolated is the wrong one, or that the setup smuggles in an assumption.
Why does a genre label matter for a writing task?
Because it commits you before you argue. Once you have called a text a memoir, its positioning becomes evidence rather than a defect; once you have called it reportage, the same positioning is a failure. Switching between labels when one becomes inconvenient is the move markers notice.
Exam move
Take four lines of prose from anywhere and run the same three questions over them: what is each sentence doing, which word would need a precising definition before the passage could be argued about, and what genre is it asking to be read as. Doing this on unfamiliar prose two or three times a week builds the recognition speed the paper tests, and it is faster than rereading the definitions.
When a seminar argument starts going in circles, try writing the precising definition on the spot.
Working through What Words Do: Statements, Definitions and Genres in HSH1000? Sia is AskSia’s AI Arts and Humanities tutor — ask any HSH1000 What Words Do: Statements, Definitions and Genres question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how HSH1000 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
