Abstract: This paper outlines a practical model for linguistic and typographical document description that enables the constructive critiquing of documents. By looking at document development as a process of negotiating communication goals and practical constraints, we can understand what compromises have been made in arriving at the final outcome, and why. We can also understand how a document's final appearance serves, or fails to serve, its communicative goals. We demonstrate our approach through an analysis of a page from a bird book, the Observer's Book of Birds (1972), showing how only some of the final design decisions appear motivated. Moving on to a consideration of genres and how they shift over time, we go on to present a more recent book, the Collins Wild Guide (1996), arguing for an increase over time in the tendency to differentiate elements of meaning using typography and layout. Next, we show the process of genre shift at work over a much shorter time scale, using as an example the developmentofa letter design by an information design company. We argue that more recent designs tend to use typography and layout to reflect more closely underlying levels of rhetorical and content structure. We suggest that our model provides a basis for describing and understanding how documents ofall kinds reach their final appearance, and for comparing documents across genres and times.

Abstract: In a Dutch survey, 201 persons were asked how intensively they used instruction guides for products such as VCRs and mobile phones, how they reacted when something went wrong, and how much importance they attached to products with good manuals. Almost everyone answered that they read either the whole manual or part of it after they had purchased a product. If there were problems in using the product, they usually attributed these to themselves. Furthermore, there was a strong possibility that a positive experience with a manual of a specific previously purchased product brand would affect future buying decisions. These results are in keeping with the findings reported by Schriver (1997) of a study conducted several years ago among a comparable group of American respondents, in which similar questions were asked. In our survey, we also asked the respondents to comment on the use of English terms in manuals. Generally speaking, no serious problems were reported. Older people with low levels of education proved to be an exception. Their reactions were negative or very negative. No significant correlation was found between the attitude toward English in manuals and the answers to other questions.

Abstract: Press releases have the explicit aim of reaching their audience through the media. On those terms, they can be considered successful when they find their way into the media and the author's message is heard. My corpus contains political press releases and the related articles in the leading Flemish newspapers. My research reports on the (extent of) overlap between a press release and its related articles (degree of penetration). I also discuss how the source text is (re)presented (type of penetration), and what linguistic tools are shared by both newspaper articles and press releases (genre properties). I argue that what makes a press release successful cannot be measured purely quantitatively and cannot be evaluated only in terms of applying genre properties successfully. Sociological factors need to be considered as well, such as context, timing, power positions of sender and receiver, and type of press release.

Abstract: Flowcharts are often used to help explain and clarify the behavior of complex artifacts. They are particularly useful to designers of documents for novice programmers. But there is more than one way to draw a flowchart. Superficially similar diagrammatic notations used in visual programming languages can reflect very different underlying paradigms. We have analyzed systematic differences between the verbal summaries of computer programs produced by groups of students using languages based on either control flow or data flow paradigms. The study builds on Pennington's approach to information types in program summaries, developing a slightly more ramified set of information types. Using this framework, we gathered, annotated and analyzed a small corpus of 80 summaries. A simple, covering set of discourse relations emerges from the data; the resulting characterization of the groups' discourses can be used to show that control flow subjects exhibit relatively unvaried levels of abstraction in their summaries, compared with data flow subjects. The patterns of error in the program summaries can also be classified, and the groups again exhibit distinctive behavior. A strong relationship between error and ion patterns indicates that differences in the paradigms and notations used in visual programming have systematic effects on people's mental representations and subsequent communicative behavior.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: This paper tackles the question how the improvement of longer texts, involving an important number of modifications in the original versions, could be estimated. After considering various solutions to this problem, we test a common procedure to measure the readability of texts: subjective judgements. Is this procedure also reliable to measure the improvement of longer texts? To try to answer this question we conducted a case study. Forty eight participants read, evaluated, used and finally re-evaluated one of two versions of an official brochure made by the "Fund for Work Accidents" to inform victims of work accidents about their rights. Results show that the modified version is more favourably evaluated than the original one, but that this advantage is a lot weaker with respect to its comprehension. Actual use of the text seemed to reduce the advantage of the modified version in terms of its evaluation.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: The concept of text coherence was developed for linear text, i.e. text of sequentially organized content. The present article addresses to what extent this concept can be applied to hypertext. Following the introduction, I will define different aspects of text coherence. I will then explain the importance of the sequential order of text constituents for coherence-building, as explored by empirical studies on text comprehension. The following section discusses how hypertext-specific forms of reading affect the processes of coherence-building and coherence-design. Finally, an exploration of how the new challenges of hypertext comprehension may be met by hypertext-specific coherence cues is followed by a summary and an outlook.