Document Design - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2002

The current wisdom on texts is that they should start by providing readers with an overview of the content (the topics discussed) and the structure (the relationship between the topics). However, in a recent paper Murray and McGlone (1997) reported that readers benefit from topic information but not from structural information provided in an overview of a very simple text. In the present experiments we ask whether these observations would be applicable to more complex texts in which structural information would be more important. Two experiments, which used a text with a complex hierarchical structure, replicated previous results on reading times. The second experiment also permitted us to rule out the effect of numerical signals in the text as the reason for the results.

Response rate is of great importance for the representativeness of a study. When it is low, there is a chance that response is selective, as the people who refuse may constitute a selective sample of the target population. Much research has already been done into the sociopsychological aspects affecting response, but so far little attention has been paid to the effect of different communicative approaches. In our study we examine the effects of a two-phased communication plan on refusal rate in telephone surveys. In real-life experiments, we investigated the effects of two prenotification techniques: sending advance letters and leaving a message on an answeringmachine or voice mail. Sending advance letters led to a statistically significant decrease in refusals by 25%, but leaving a message on answering machines or voice mail led to no statistically significant decrease in refusals. The results are interpreted in the light of Compliance Theory and Elaboration Likelihood Theory. Possible consequences for research bureaus that conduct telephone surveys are discussed.

In technical discourse, the majority of texts are found to be accessible only to a specialist audience, and the feeling is prevalent with some technical genres that they would lose their generic integrity if part of their complexity was removed, since such a change would jeopardize the acceptability of the texts. Technical translators, on the other hand, often feel a strong need to simplify conventional technical writing style, which by convention has a high frequency of passives, nominalizations, nonfinite clauses and compound noun clusters, and omits some definite articles. Halliday (1994) and Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) have referred to some of these configurations (nominalizations, nominal groups, and nonfinite clauses) as grammatical metaphor (GM). Following Halliday’s argumentation, I have suggested an extension of the GM range to also include the passive and definite article omission (see, for example, Lassen, 1997, pp. 67–83), making possible a discussion of the characteristic stylistic features in technical discourse under the umbrella term GM. This article discusses the stylistic dilemmas involved in negotiating between the two conflicting aims of observing genre conventions and facilitating comprehen- sion. The empirical basis of the discussion is a survey in which the attitudes of different audiences to text accessibility and acceptability were investigated by means of a questionnaire distributed to a variety of professional groupings, including technical writers, translators, engi- neers, and technical language instructors, as well as a nonspecialist group of respondents with mixed occupations who were unfamiliar with technical writing style. The respondents were encouraged to state their attitudes to accessibility and acceptability on the basis of three text versions. One version was an original text, the second a text from which the grammatical metaphors had been removed, and the third was a version with short sentences.

The consensus view in cognitive psychology is that the construction of situation models is an integral part of language comprehension. A great deal of empirical evidence supports this view. Moreover, recent theorizing and empirical evidence suggest that situation models are best viewed as experiential simulations of the narrated events, actions, people, objects, and places. In this Experiential View, language is a set of cues guiding the simulation processes, by activating perceptual representations stored in the brain areas that are also active during the direct experience of the referent object, person, or event. In this article I discuss the empirical evidence for the Experiential view from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In addition, I consider some of the implications of this view for the design of instructional documents.

Conventional electronic documents present their content visually on screen but the information could be spoken, or the two modalities might be combined — e.g. when mixing text and graphics. If the relative benefits of aural and visual language depend on characteristics of the target audience (e.g. age and sensory impairments, language fluency, etc), parallel versions of documents may sometimes be desirable. The advantages of different modalities will also vary with a document’s communication goals — such as informing, persuading, answering questions or giving directions. Conceptual explanations may be better if read because readers can pause and re-read but procedural explanations may be better when listened to, especially if the document provides animated demonstrations accompanied by a spoken commentary. This paper overviews empirical studies suggesting that information modality can influence the document user’s three main clusters of activities, namely finding, understanding and applying the author’s message. This raises questions such as: Would it help if electronic documents let users customise the synthetic speech, perhaps selecting the sex of the speaker? When might a modality change imply changes to other linguistic features? If we do not write as we speak, will enhanced text-to-speech technology be sufficient for creating appropriate talking documents?