Hello, everyone. This is Emily from uni-edit answering today's question: recognize,
realize, comprehend, know, understand, appreciate, digest: what's the difference?
Recognize, realize, comprehend, know, understand, appreciate, and digest are all
words that are used very often in research manuscripts. They are all about
gaining knowledge. The main meaning is to gain knowledge, but each word has a
different connotation. That is the feeling or subtle meaning is different
for each word. To use the words accurately, you need to appreciate the
connotation of each word. Let's use this well-written example sentence that
includes three of our words: recognize, realize, and comprehend. I began to
recognize similar patterns in the way these short stories all develop. As soon
as I began to comprehend the underlying message the author was trying to convey.
I realized they are not the happy stories I originally thought they were.
Recognize means gaining knowledge, but the connotation is the identification of
a fact or truth through the process of observing. The reader identified the fact
pattern through the process of reading and observation. It is simply a statement
of the fact identification with no personal emotion or opinion expressed.
Realize means gaining knowledge, but the connotation is emphasizing the moment of
understanding and accepting fact or truth. After a process of analysis in this
context there's a strong sense of emotion, likely an element of surprise
that happened at a short moment in time-the moment of the reader becoming aware
of and accepting the fact that differs to his or her original belief. Comprehend
means gaining knowledge, but the connotation is the process of analysis
that generated a genuine understanding of a fact or truth. In this context,
comprehend is much like understand, but it involves the analysis process. Reading
the stories and thinking about the author's message and a
much deeper level of understanding (underlying message). You can see the
author carefully selected the most suitable word for each sentence to
accurately describe the situation using the connotation of the word. Now, let's
look at more examples using other words from our list of similar words: know,
understand, appreciate, and digest using this example paragraph: I know the
procedure is not straightforward. I understand what you are saying that the
decision is ultimately not made by you, but I really appreciate you taking time
to listen to my side of the story. I hope you will take a few minutes to digest
everything I just said and consider my argument. Know means gaining knowledge, but
the connotation is a strong fact that the subject is clearly aware of. This
doesn't tend to involve emotion nor involve a deeper insight as understand
does. So here know is used to indicate a neutral
connotation of having knowledge. Understand means gaining knowledge, but
the connotation is accepting a truth or fact with empathy shown to the
counterpart. Understand in this context also entails an element of empathy. The
person is already acknowledging their knowing the fact, but following on with
another similar word, understand, and the reason is to stress that even though
their opinions differ he or she has considered the opposite viewpoint with
the hope to also make the other person share the same kind of empathy in return.
Appreciate means gaining knowledge, but the connotation is the outward
expression of an emotion that shows empathy to the counterpart. The
difference between appreciate and understand is that the former involves
much more of the speaker's personal feeling. The purpose of using this word
is also to express gratitude which means being thankful for the other person's
actions. Digest means gaining knowledge, but the connotation is information
processing through analysis and observation to generate one's own truth
or fact. Let's revisit our example, it reads: I know the procedure is not
straightforward. I understand what you are saying that the decision is
ultimately not made by you, but I really appreciate you taking the time to listen
to my side of the story. I hope you will take a few minutes to digest everything
I just said and consider my argument. From this comprehensive example you can
see the native speaker has deep knowledge of the connotations of similar
words. The native speaker of English has this deep knowledge usually without
knowing and has developed it from a lifetime of experience of hearing and
reading in real-life situations. Further, very few reference books or
websites provide full detailed descriptions of connotations. The main
reason is that such a book would be thousands of pages long.
Nevertheless, the keen author can gain much useful knowledge to commonly used
words in academic writing in their connotations through careful and focused
study. Here is a summary of the connotations of this list of words. Take
a few moments to review.
We hope you enjoyed this tip. Once again, This is Emily from uni-edit. Have a wonderful
day.