Chapter 8: Understanding the Difference
Between Fact and Opinion
From this chapter, you’ll learn how
• facts and opinions differ.
• to spot when and where opinions have been
slipped in with facts.
• to distinguish between informed and
uninformed opinions.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Defining Terms: Factual Statements
Statements of fact
• can be verified, or checked, for accuracy.
• often include dates, numbers, and statistics.
• do not vary from person to person or place to place.
• describe events in language that has little
or no emotional effect on the listener or reader.
• don’t make predictions, express value judgments,
or offer interpretations.
• aren’t subject to change, except in cases where previously unavailable
information or new technology arrives on the scene.
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The following are all statements of fact
1. Rapper Eminem said in an interview on 60 minutes that he
only uses profanity in his music, never at home.
2. In 1950, the leader of South Korea, Syngman Rhee
threatened to invade North Korea.
3. The Australian Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks.
4. Singer and songwriter Alicia Keyes is a classically trained
pianist.
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Defining Terms: Opinions
Statements of Opinion
• are influenced by the writer’s or speaker’s experiences,
training, interests, and context.
• use language that often packs an emotional punch.
• frequently make value judgments, e.g., “Rachel Ray is
much more likable than Martha Stewart.”
• often predict future events.
• are likely to provide interpretations of events, e.g., “ In his
brutal treatment of Rihanna, Chris Brown was repeating
what he had learned from his father.”
• cannot be checked for accuracy.
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Spot Quiz on Fact and Opinion
What makes statement 1 a fact and statement 2
an opinion?
1. In 2010, three teenage boys from the Fiji
Islands were adrift on the ocean for fifty
days.
2. God was watching out for the three teenage
boys who were rescued in 2010, after being
adrift on the ocean, with no food or water
supplies, for a total of fifty days.
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What makes both of these statements facts rather than opinions?
1. The blues singer Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins
on January 25th, 1938.
2. Beyoncé Knowles played the blues singer Etta James
in the film Cadillac Records.
• How might you re-write each of these statements to make them
opinions rather than facts?
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Here are two possible ways those
facts could become opinions.
• Jamesetta Hawkins born January 25, 1938 went on to
become Etta James, the greatest blues singer of all
time.
• When Beyoncé Knowles played Etta James in Cadillac
Records, she proved, once and for all, that she could
act as well as sing.
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Blending Fact and Opinion
Writers don’t necessarily keep facts and opinions in separate
sentences. Often the two are blended together. Where in the
following sentence does the fact leave off and the opinion
begin?
• Grizzly bear deaths neared record levels for the
region around Yellowstone National Park in 2010, but
government biologists said the population is robust
enough to withstand the heavy losses.
What word would need to be changed to make the
opinion part of the statement a little more obvious?
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Sometimes one word makes all the difference.
Note how the change of one word makes it
clearer when an opinion is being inserted:
Grizzly bear deaths neared record levels for the
region around Yellowstone National Park in
2010, but government biologists believe the
population is robust enough to withstand the
heavy losses.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Be alert to words that make value judgments; they are
signs of opinions being mixed in with facts.
Where in the following statements are words
that evaluate the person or action described?
1. Surprisingly, only five per cent of the students
attending charter schools performed better than
students attending public schools.
2. Understandably, the park service employees had to
shoot grizzlies that had approached human beings.
3. Out of necessity, the university launched a new
program focused on preventing plagiarism.
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Spot Quiz: Recognizing Facts, Opinions, and
a Mix of Both
Identify each of the following statements as a
fact, an opinion, or a blend of both:
1. In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted to demote
Pluto from a full-fledged planet to a “dwarf planet.”
2. Inside Job, a movie about the financial meltdown of 2008, is a
documentary that should be seen by everyone interested in knowing how
such a disaster could happen.
3. No one under the age of thirty uses e-mail anymore; it’s too slow.
4. In 2010, the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano spewed clouds of
ash into the sky as high as 33,000 feet.
5. In 2010, Joao Silva, one of the most talented and respected
photojournalists working in the world today, lost both of his legs when he
stepped on a plastic land mine in Afghanistan.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Informed and Uninformed Opinions
• You can’t verify an opinion. If someone says, Apple’s iPhone is a better cell
phone than Google’s Android, you can’t disprove that person’s opinion
because what you think of as better- say the ability to add apps from
developers not approved by Apple—might not be be shared by the iPhone
lover, who favors high tech, good-looking design and ease of use.
• In other words, it’s very hard, sometimes impossible, to verify why one
thing is better than another because the criteria, or standards, for that
judgment vary from person to person. There’s no outside source to check
for accuracy.
• However, you can decide, or even say, aloud that the other person’s
opinion is informed or uninformed. Here’s the difference between the
two:
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Defining Terms: Informed and Uninformed Opinions
Informed opinions are
• backed by reasons.
• supported by facts.
• based on up-to-date evidence.
Uninformed opinions lack all of the above. In addition,
they are
• often expressed with great confidence.
• frequently voiced in a way that discourages the
expression of opposition.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Example of an Informed Opinion
Informed
• If you think you have to become muddled and soft-headed as
you age, think again. As we grow older, the two sides of the
brain become more connected, allowing us to recognize
patterns more easily and draw more original conclusions
about the world around us. To get some insight into how the
brain’s hemispheres become more cooperative over time,
Gene Cohen’s book The Mature Mind is a superb resource. As
Cohen writes, “The neurons themselves may lose some
processing speed with age, but they become ever more richly
entwined… making way for greater creativity.”
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Example of an Uninformed Opinion
• Since the 1980s, the United States has rapidly been taken over
by the wealthiest one percent of the population. The rich
have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. In many
ways, we have seen the hands of time turn backward, and the
country today resembles the Gilded Age of the late
nineteenth century when the country was ruled by the
wealthy industrialists who emerged following the Civil War.
Note: The opinion expressed here has no back up. It’s not
informed by any reasons or evidence for the claim. The
reference to the Gilded Age of the past starts to provide a
reason for the opinion, but lacking any details about the
resemblance, the allusion adds nothing to the author’s
original statement.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Final Wrap
1. What’s the key difference between facts and opinions?
2. Is the following statement a fact or an opinion: “Without
doubt, feminism has made women unhappier now than they
were before the second wave of feminism began in the
1960s”?
3. Fact or Opinion? In the United States, bullying in the schools
has become an epidemic at all grade levels.
4. Fact or Opinion? Thomas Jefferson issued repeated warnings
against the dangers of a centralized government.
5. Fact or Opinion? In 2009, the World Health Organization
issued a statement saying that swine influenza had become
a pandemic, meaning the virus could be quickly spread
throughout the world.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Final Wrap
6. Are the following statements fact, opinion, or a blend of
both?
a) In 47 B.C. Cleopatra took a trip down the Nile with Julius
Ceasar.
b) Jay-Z, born Shawn Corey Carter in 1969, exemplifies the
American belief that people can make their own success
with a mix of luck and hard work.
c) When Louis Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court
in 1916, his nomination was attacked, and Brandeis was
called a troublemaker, a hypocrite, and a socialist, but what
his critics really meant was that Brandeis was Jewish.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Final Wrap
7. Is the following opinion informed or uninformed?
• Grizzly bear deaths in the region around Yellowstone National Park rose to
record levels in 2010. According to government biologists, we should not
be concerned that this endangered group of animals took such a hard hit.
But I, along with other wildlife groups like the Greater Yellowstone
Coalition, have my doubts. Two dietary staples of grizzlies are declining,
the cutthroat trout and nuts from whitebark pine cones. The more their
food supplies decline, the more likely it is the bears will push into humaninhabited areas, where they are likely to be killed. In addition, the human
population in the area surrounding Yellowstone is growing, making it more
likely for bears and humans to collide, a meeting that is likely to end with
some bears dying. As Chuck Schwartz, a U.S. biologist has pointed out
“Eight-five plus percent of independent bears that die, die because of
people.” In other words, the more bears come into contact with people,
the more likely they are to die. Given that fact, the government’s
optimism for the grizzlies future is hard to fathom.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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Final Wrap
8. What about this one?
• Many of us hope to see the economy return to normal and
the jobless rate to be cut in half, but that hope is much too
optimistic. What we are experiencing is structural, rather than
cyclical, unemployment i.e. the economy no longer needs
specific jobs requiring a particular set of skills. For example,
now that print can be set via computers, jobs for manual type
setters, people who actually moved letters around to create
printed pages, no longer exist. This kind of structural
unemployment cannot be fixed. Government intervention is
useless. The jobs are obsolete and won’t come back. Instead
the people who have lost their jobs have to learn new and
marketable skills, because the expertise that got them hired in
the past won’t get them hired in the future. It is this kind of
structural unemployment that we are currently facing.
copyright© Laraine Flemming 2012
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What Do You Think?
The government is appealing a ruling that put grizzly bears
back on the list of endangered species after they had been
removed. The bears were returned to the list due to a law suit
filed by the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an organization
that believes the bears should not be “delisted.” The
organization filed the suit because it believes that the bears’
being on the list offers them a greater number of protections,
which will encourage their survival. Create a search term for
a Web search that will give you some insight into the
controversy and be prepared to offer, in class or on paper, an
informed opinion in response to this question: Should grizzly
bears be removed from the list of endangered species?
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