What does this mean?

Today in Class we looked at an example of how one set of words meant different things to two groups of people. For the first group, this set of words was simply the authors names to assigned readings. For the other group, this was a poem in which they completely disected the religious meaning behind it without any previous knowledge of what it meant. This is the perfect example of how different instructions provide different results defined by what the reader knows. What may seem clear to one group means something completely different to another group, depending on the community or setting of the information.

In the class following my technical writing class, we talked about something which almost completely relates. This class is a visual comm class in which we were discussing the study of semiotics. For those who do not know, semiotics is the study of signs and codes. Within this study, we talked about denotative meaning and conotative meaning.

Denotative meaning= literal meaning, what is actually there.

Connotative meaning= implied, evoked meaning, what our culture teaches us.

One example we looked at was from an actual ad. As you can see, my teacher has a dirty mind, but the example gets the point across.
This means different things to different people depending on what thier cultural background is

When asked, children saw this as a twister game on bed, but to some adults, the idea they got from this image was kinky sex. I guess this shows how one image/idea can mean different things to different people depending on the context they are looking at it in, and thier background experiences.

This shows us why it is important to create a clear context in which our instructions should be writen, designated for a specific audience, as it can be interpreted different ways.