Raise awareness

When you “raise awareness,” you are publicizing an important cause.

Today's story: Free Britney
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Raise awareness

Today’s English expression is to “raise awareness.” When you raise awareness, you are publicizing an important cause. Earlier today, you heard that fans of Britney Spears have been raising awareness of her conservatorship for years. They have been participating in online forums, conducting media interviews, and otherwise trying to attract attention to their cause. They want people to know about and care about this issue. It’s entirely possible to listen to a Britney Spears song or even go to her concerts and not know anything about her conservatorship. I, in fact, didn’t know much about it before today. That’s why fans wanted to raise awareness; they wanted to spread the word and make more people aware of her situation.

Raising awareness is a tool used to promote good causes. If something is important to you, you want other people to know as much as possible about it. And some awareness campaigns have been very successful. When cars first became popular, they didn’t have seatbelts. Then, they had seatbelts, but nobody used them. Safety activists worked tirelessly to raise awareness of seatbelts and their benefits.

For a while, colored wristbands were a popular way to raise awareness of favorite causes. People wore red wristbands to raise awareness of HIV and AIDS. That was important because, for many years, there was a stigma associated with having HIV and nobody wanted to talk about it. Awareness campaigns helped humanize the disease and brought empathy to people who lived with it.

The wristbands became such a popular way to raise awareness for a cause that dozens of causes have their own colors. Every type of cancer now seems to have a color, even causes like child abuse, Alzheimer’s, blindness, smoking cessation all have wristbands to raise awareness. Eventually, there were so many competing colors and causes, the wristbands gave rise more to confusion than to awareness.

And so, we arrive at one of the criticisms of “raising awareness.” Compared to doing anything concrete, “raising awareness” is easy. All you have to do is call attention to yourself and your cause. This is understandable. If you care deeply about something, you naturally want other people to be aware of it, so your first step is to “raise awareness.” But that’s the simple part. If you want to change people’s behaviors—if you really want them to stop smoking, to stop using e-cigarettes, to get screened for colon cancer, to reduce their carbon emissions, to stop cutting down trees in the Amazon, to fund the arts, whatever the cause might be—if you want people to change their behavior, it’s not enough to just raise awareness. You have to persuade.

JR’s song of the week

Today’s song of the week is “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers. The lead singer is Jakob Dylan, the son of legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The lyrics are full of metaphors, but one is about driving a car home with just one functional headlight—meaning, even if you don’t get everything you want, you can still get by. “We can pull it all together / we can drive it home / with one headlight.” The song of the week is “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers.

See you next time!

And that’s all for Lesson 381 on Thursday, July 15, 2021. Remember that you can upgrade your English skills by taking advantage of all the lesson resources at PlainEnglish.com. That’s where you can improve your listening with our interactive dictation exercises; you can also switch between the fast and slow versions of the audio. The how-to video takes a deep dive into how to express a more complex idea in English. You can practice what you learn in the discussion area. And test your understanding with our lesson quiz and fill-in-the-blank exercises. There’s lots to do, lots of great ways to extend your learning at PlainEnglish.com. You can find all the resources for today’s lesson at PlainEnglish.com/381.

We’ll be back on Monday with a new lesson for you. See you then!

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Story: Free Britney