- [David] From the moment she strolled into my office,
I could tell she was gonna be
a difficult sentence to read.
You could tell from the way she walked
she was carrying a lot of information,
but getting it out of her wouldn't be easy.
I was gonna need to make an inference.
Hey, what's up readers?
David here.
I'm taking advantage of the cold that I have
by doing my serious detective voice
in order to teach you about inferences.
(phone ringing)
Hold on, let me get that.
Hi, this is David.
I'm in the middle of doing a video.
Now isn't a great time.
- [Man On Phone] Hello, I have information about
what an inference is.
- [David] Oh, oh that's great.
Cool, follow me over to the next screen.
What is an inference, please?
- [Man On Phone] An inference is a conclusion that you make
based on clues given in a piece of writing.
It's more than a guess,
but it's not just an observation either.
- [David] Great, thank you.
Was that all you needed?
- [Man On Phone] Yeah, that was my only thing.
- [David] All right, thanks, bye.
- [Man On Phone] Goodbye.
- [David] So an inference is a conclusion
that you draw from writing.
It's an idea that you pull from a sentence
or a passage that isn't literally printed there.
It's the detective work of reading,
finding clues that help you make sense
of what's being said.
I feel like we're kind of getting
bogged down in theory land so let's take a look
at an example.
I went outside and made an enormous snow fort.
There's my snow fort.
It's a D on the flag to represent me.
There's me little hot cocoa,
couple marshmallows floating in there,
my Khan Academy mug.
They don't make Khan Academy mugs.
I want a Khan Academy mug.
Okay, so what conclusions can we draw
from these two sentences?
I went outside and made an enormous snow fort.
Beautiful, brilliant, enormous.
Then I came inside and had a big mug of hot chocolate.
Same deal, brilliant, beautiful, enormous.
What conclusions can I draw about this situation?
Well if you're making things out of snow
and then you're coming inside and having hot chocolate,
it's probably not the height of summer.
One inference that I can draw
from these two sentences together
is that it is winter time when this sentence takes place.
Where I live, these are not activities
that one pursues in the height of summer outside.
I'm looking for clues within the text.
Snow fort, I'm outside, I came inside
and then I had hot chocolate
which is not traditionally a beverage
that is consumed when it's warm out.
Let's take a look at another example.
This paragraph is part of a longer passage
that is about a young ballet dancer named Michaela.
Michaela danced so wonderfully
that she was awarded a scholarship
to attend the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School
at the American Ballet Theater.
That was only the beginning of her dancing success.
When she was 17, Michaela danced with
the Dance Theater of Harlem professional company.
Later, she joined the Dutch National Junior Company.
Today, Michaela is a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet.
So very quickly without getting
bogged down in this passage,
what are some conclusions, what are some inferences
that we can draw about Michaela?
Who is Michaela?
What do we know about her?
We know that she's a dancer.
We know that she's very good at it, right?
She danced so wonderfully that she got a scholarship.
So I'm gonna say Michaela is very talented
and we know that her talent led to success
because her getting the scholarship
was only the beginning of her dancing success.
We can see from the passage that she was part of
at least three different dance companies,
the Dance Theater of Harlem,
the Dutch National Junior Company,
and as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet today.
So I'm gonna say that Michaela is a very hard worker.
Now notice no where in the passage does it say
Michaela is a very talented, hard working dancer.
Just like in the previous example,
it didn't say, it was winter outside
so I made a snow fort.
What the skill of inference is
requires you to be a detective
and take your magnifying glass to the passage
to discover clues.
Imagine you're a detective like this dog.
He's wearing a little deer stalker cap.
Let's call him, let's call him Sherlock Bones,
the famous dog detective that I just made up.
I feel like Sherlock Holmes is always smoking a pipe
so I'm gonna give this dog like a,
I don't know a bone or a piece of rawhide or something.
Imagine that you are a detective or a dog detective
if you like and every time you read a text,
let's say a book, that you are searching
for clues within it.
What you're doing when you make an inference
is you are taking the information that you already know
about the world and the places and people in it
and how they behave and what they look like
and what they do
and you're applying that knowledge to the text.
When do people build snowmen?
When do people build snow forts?
When do they drink hot cocoa?
In the winter time.
An important thing to remember though
is that inferring is not guessing.
Any time you make an inference,
you have to be pulling it directly from the text.
That's your jumping off point.
It can't just be a wild guess out of no where.
It comes from information that you've got there on the page.
Now if you'll excuse me,
I'm going to go eat my weight in cough drops.
You can learn anything, David out.