Analyzing Message in "What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us?"

In this post I will be analyzing the underlying messages the author is trying to convey in "What Do Talking Apes Really Tell Us?", and what purpose she is trying to achieve. Most of these reasons are in fact underlying, in that Hu has several underlying meanings in her article. 

The author is trying to convey her opinion that Koko that gorilla does not understand language, rather Patterson twists Koko's general understanding of signs to seem like she does. She starts off her argument by referring to the occasion where Koko seemed to understand being told that Robin Williams had passed away. Hu then uses past documented "conversations" with Koko to state her case. She analyzes these interactions and happenings and based on the circumstances, synthesizes her case and tries to persuade the reader using proof that Koko does not actually understanding English. She makes the readers reflect on their own feelings on the subject by pointing out the way that Penny Patterson manipulates Koko's signs and the American public eats up Patterson's interpretation out of desire for it to be true. 

Riegler, Karola "Thinking... please wait" 06/14/09 via flickr.
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Out of all of these different techniques the author employs, the most relevant are her opinion expression, synthesizing, moving the readers to feel a certain way through reflection to work towards her goal in her writing. I found these most relevant because of the nature of the goal she is trying to achieve. 

Hu is not necessarily trying to move the reader to action, but rather convince them her opinion is the correct one. Since this is her ultimate goal (as I have interpreted it) the expression of her opinion is obviously very important. Then to back up her opinion, she uses the synthesizing of information, events, and circumstances to give the reader proof. This achieves her goal of trying to make the reader feel a certain way about Koko's communication skills or lack thereof. In this case, trying to convince the reader to feel like they are being manipulated into believing Koko's signs are not arbitrary, and that her apparent skills are shaky at best. 

The bullet points about advocating for change and informing the reader about a commonly misunderstood topic are not very relevant in this article. Hu does not really advocate for change or some big movement against believing Koko the gorilla understands the English language. I feel like this would probably be illogical since its not such a widespread issue. The most she tries to do is really change the way we think about the topic at hand. Which is of course a change, but not a big dramatic one like I think the textbook is implying. This topic isn't necessarily commonly misunderstood either, in fact I think a lot of people are skeptics about it to a degree. 

The author actually does convey several underlying nuances and layers in her message. Hu uses several nuanced ways of saying the same message to get her point across. Just like how hearing a question asked a slightly different way can suddenly make it click, the author tries to use these nuances to make her point click to her audience. There are also several different layers to her argument, each of which is meant to give further emphasis to her point. For example she states her claim about Koko's lack of language skills, then layers on the fact that Patterson is manipulating the public, then adds another layer by pointing out the cultural tendency to believe what we want to be true. These all slowly add up to build a mountain of evidence she has to draw on for her case.