"Actions speak louder than words"

I think that this saying is a little cliché simply because most people have heard of it, however I think that “cliché” has too much of a negative connotation associated with it. Just because it’s cliché, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. I once heard someone say that clichés are clichés for a reason—it is because they are so true, that they have become so over-used. I think that this saying, “actions speak louder than words,” is extremely true, but even though most people have heard of, I don’t think that many consider it in their daily lives.

In my experience, people are fixated with words and what people say. We “hang onto” words and we usually believe them (even when we are given reason to do otherwise). When people “break their word” or don’t follow through on what they have promised, we usually overlook these faults when their words say that it won’t happen again. I think that we could all do to remember that “actions speak louder than words” in these scenarios. If they never actually DO anything, their saying that they will do it means nothing.

The physical structure of this saying is interesting as well. By using personification and having the nominalization “actions” speak, the act is emphasized rather than the person doing the act. This makes the saying universally applicable. It’s not important who does the action, only that it is done. It’s not selecting certain people’s words that aren’t louder than other people’s actions…”words” in general aren’t as loud as “actions” in general.

This saying is also rather ironic because we use words to “speak” and yet it is our actions, which aren’t used in speaking, that do the speaking better.

I think that this saying uses inductive reasoning because we usually start by looking at a specific event in our lives that happened some time before, and it is usually down the road that we realize that this statement is applicable to that situation. After we look at the specific scenario and the events that subsequently occurred, we usually see whether someone’s words weren’t truthful, and realize that we should have paid attention to the person’s actions instead of trusting their words alone.