Will the generation of readers that grow in the age of the Internet respond to text differently than earlier generations? What if in the year 2015 a teenager chooses an online version of Harry Potter where they can actually influence the text to determine an adventure that no one else has ever encountered? It is entirely possible that the Internet could potentially affect how future readers respond to text based on their online experiences. Perhaps these future readers will no longer respond to the passive roles that static text can sometimes place them in. They may seek instead, an active role in both the text and the options they have in the online world. How can text support this role? What kinds of rhetorical reading strategies brought fourth by Technical Communication (TC) could support new adaptations to text that allow the reader to actively engage in both content and navigation online to capture a richer, more rewarding experience? 

An investigation into Positivism might be helpful in gaining a better understanding of how passive roles for readers became a dominant writing strategy for authors in the field of TC. As Carolyn Miller illustrates in A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,   “Put simply, positivism is the conviction that sensory data are the only permissible basis for knowledge; consequently, the only meaningful statements are those which can be empirically verified” (Miller 612). From this idea of sensory data as the basis for knowledge comes a form and style of writing which can only admit real, empirical observations and the classification and interpretation of data. The reader is expected to study text to gain an understanding of what can be verified within the context or reality, to reflect empirical evidence back to whoever seeks it. Gone from writing, then, are strategically crafted cues, designed to help the reader create their own interpretation of the text. The reader’s role as outlined by Miller is reduced to passivity, “Under the sway of positivism, scientists adopted as conventions the obvious stylistic means for staying out of the way of the subject matter-third person constructions, personifications, passive voice” (Miller 614). But what if more is expected of the reader? What if they are expected to interpret, or to construct meaning out of text to affect it, to own it for themselves?

Passive readers should have passive expectations placed on them. In the context of navigation and online content, passive responses to text could limit the ability to seek out information or navigate forward through a process. A passive construction of an online environment could prevent text from relating to navigation, creating a world that makes no sense to anyone who visits it, and provides no amount of motivation for discovery. Navigation and content should work together to foster an avenue for active searching; they should support each other and drive activity toward one another. How to encourage the reader to change their roles from a passive responder to text to one that is actively engaged remains the challenge.

Part of responding to text in an active way is responding to cues placed within the text. Active engagement and the deconstruction of cues can support the making of connections in text, encouraging the reader to construct meaning. In Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning, Christina Haas and Linda Flower illustrate this connection between cues and the creation of meaning,

If reading, then, is a process of responding to cues in the text and in the reader’s context to build a complex, multi-faceted representation of meaning, it should be no surprise that different readers might construct radically different representations of the same text and might use very different strategies to do so  (Hass, Flower 169).

line-height:200%;font-family:Garamond'>What this proposes is that as each reader actively engages themselves to the text, they create a new text, a meaning in context of their own understanding and the author’s intention. The reader enters the text seeking out an intention that the author has for them. They might ask themselves, “where is it that the author wants me to go? And what does this mean for my own understanding of the landscape I’m presented.”  The conjunction of these two worlds, the author’s and the readers, is a singular, multi-dimensional experience,

(Seth, the reader) is creating a multi-dimensional representation of the text that includes representations of its content, representations of the structure and functions of the text, representations of author’s intentions and his own experience and knowledge as a reader of text (Hass, Flower 175).

This entire experience, one of recognizing cues in text, following the author’s path, and creating for oneself, is summarized as a “rhetorical strategies” by Hass and Flower,

Rhetorical strategies take a step beyond the text itself. They are concerned with constructing a rhetorical situation for the text, trying to account for author’s purpose, context, and effect on the audience. In rhetorical reading strategies reader’s use cues in text, and their own knowledge of discourse situations to recreate or infer the rhetorical situation of the text they are reading (176).

Online content and navigation can be built on a rhetorical situation as well, replete with navigational cues and an author’s intent layered into content. This is not to say that web sites should be designed in such a way that they need to be deconstructed to read and navigate. The goal should be to leverage the reader’s abilities to respond to cues and recognize familiar rhetorical situations.

Rhetorical situations that are familiar are based on past roles the author has placed the reader in. In The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction, Walter Ong refers to this “fictional reader,” as a role the author creates in the text based on previous roles author’s had created,

If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers, and so on back to the dawn of written narrative (Ong 11).

style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:200%;font-family:Garamond'>This connection with previous roles could be the mechanism for the reader to first recognize the rhetorical strategies that Haas and Flower refer to, then to build their own meaning of that representation inside the text. Each visitor to a web site has a role to play. In the simplest example, the reader could be a shopper, looking for a Christmas gift for their loved one.  When this reader arrives at a commercial site, say Amazon.com, they should be immediately placed in the role of shopper. Both content and navigation should place the reader in the role of someone who is there to find what they want, say a book, and continue through the process to purchase. If the site is designed in both content and navigation to experience only what other readers think about a product and loses site of the goal of a purchase, the reader, or user, will feel displaced and quickly navigate away from that site.

Ong refers to this experience of responding to text, or in this example, content and navigation, as the “reader-response theory.” The simple illustration in the shopper’s experience above of reader-response to site content and navigation becomes more and more apparent as the complexity of a site increases. Could it be that the ability to respond to content, to play the role that the author places us in, is supported by roles others have played through the ages? This might be why the role seems familiar to the reader, and why they are able to understand it and the to own it to become their experience. As rhetorical situations become more complex, more and more past situations can be absorbed to bring the experience closer to familiar, to understand it and create meaning from it.

Another way to understand reader-response theory as it relates to how readers create meaning from disparate, complex pieces of information is to apply the concept of “schemata.” Janice E. Redish, in Understanding Readers, explains how readers actively interpret text and what they base their interpretations on, “The basis is their own prior knowledge and the expectations that they have about the subject matter, the type of document, and the context in which they are reading the document. Their knowledge and expectations are organized into schemata” (Redish 11).  Anderson and Pearson in Redish illustrate this further, “schemata are networks of information connected by chronology, functions, topics and so on” (11). 

Making connections and linking knowledge through schemata is an effective way to design user navigation and content on web sites. If a reader can build a multidimensional understanding of content then they will be able to effectively use and navigate the site. Sites built on this model will encourage this effective use. Redish relates schemata directly to hypertext, “They (schemata) are multidimensional, rather like hypertext, in that one piece of information can be linked to many others, each with its own set of connections” (11). This linking of information through chronology, functions, and past models appears to come out of the original concept of reader-response theory that Ong sets up as illustrated earlier. Past experiences help to support the creation of a mental model, a schemata, and schemata help to decode hypertext. Content and navigation tied closely together through a series of schemata, can increase the complexity and depth of a web site, allowing for a richer online experience. 

Some work as been done to connect hypertext to a new understanding of readers and their responses to text, particularly in the medium of computers.

line-height:200%;font-family:Garamond'>As mentioned earlier, a reader brings their own history and knowledge to text, which can create as many interpretations to text as there are readers. This could suggest that a text is relatively unstable, that there is no sure way of determining how a reader is going to respond to the text.  In “Critical Theory and the New Writing Space,” Jay David Bolter asserts the same about computers and text, “A computer text is never stable and never detached from the changing contexts that readers bring to it” (Bolter 155). Bolter examines how the computer as a medium and particularly hypertext are prime examples of how reader response theory plays a role in the making of text,

The new medium reifies the metaphor of reader response, for the reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words. Even if the author has written all the words, the reader must call them up and determine the order of presentation by the choices made or the commands issued. There is no single univocal text apart from the reader; the author writes a set of potential texts, from which the reader chooses (158).

line-height:200%;font-family:Garamond'> In fact, it could be that hypertext embodies the concept of readers creating meaning from text more than any other medium.  In static text the reader creates meaning from previous roles and cues, with hypertext, the cues are active and roles could take on a near infinite number of forms based on how the reader chooses to respond to those cues. With hypertext, the reader has an even greater opportunity change text, to make connections that even the author had never before imagined.

Stressing connections rather than textual independence, the electronic space rewrites the possibilities of reference and allusion. Not only can one passage in an electronic text refer to another, but the text can bend so that any two passages touch, displaying themselves contiguously to the reader (163, 164).

What this means for the reader is that while engaging in an online experience, connections between content and navigation need to be designed well, and with the idea that the reader will make their own interpretations of the cues placed in content to respond to the navigation. Linking content and navigation is not a new science or a revelation in interaction design, but understanding the readers response to cues placed in text aren’t always considered. The thinking about users, or readers, places them in a simple role, one where the author of content expects them to respond consistently and that nearly all readers will respond the same. This idea of readers might work for a simplistic site with limited navigation, but as the complexity and depth of a site increases, it will quickly fall apart and fail to serve the needs of the site designers or users. Building content and navigation together with reader responses in mind could allow for a more robust and enriching online experience.

Considering just reader response theory in linking content and navigation in site design could be just the beginning. What if you could also build devices into content that would further motivate the reader/user? In Emplotting the reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation, David Goodwin illustrates such a device. Goodwin’s device for motivating the reader is based on an age old “heroic narrative” (Goodwin 99). The basic premise is that manuals, are difficult to deconstruct, and the reader must be encouraged somehow to face obstacles inherent in the writing,

It (the manual) must encourage the reader to face the daunting spectre of neologisms, foreign terms, and abstract, technical concepts, and to continue to read the text in spite of these obstacles. To accomplish this goal, a manual must emplot the reader, that is, must create an action-oriented role within a storyline that transforms the reader from a hesitant, if not reluctant neophyte, into a competent software user (100).

Heroes face obstacles and overcome them and their actions take on a special significance, “the hero undertakes special actions such as making agreements, overcoming opposition, solving problems and so on” (108).

Not only could this “action-oriented role” be applied to manuals, but it could also be built into content and navigation.  What better way to motivate the reader/user though a site than to provide them with a journey, one rich with agreements, opposition, and problems. When Walter Ong illustrates the importance and value of reader roles played out and developed through history, perhaps the original role was that of the hero. Surely we could all recognize and respond to this role, since we have probably seen it more than any other.  Perhaps the hero’s role is also a natural break from the restrictive role that positivism would place us in. Goodwin refers to this when he writes about the hero’s values, “Writers transform these values into motivations by not forcing authorial readers to assume restrictive and mechanical roles, and instead, embedding them in a narrative which acknowledges their self-image, desires, and need for symbolic action” (108).

Getting readers to assume more active roles helps them to recognize cues and construct their own meaning about that text. If this active role is considered when designing content and navigation into a web site, perhaps the reader/user will become more engaged, navigate more effectively, and take more meaning away from that site. Building complexity and richness into a site doesn’t mean the site will become more difficult to navigate or derive meaning from, it simply means that the reader and their roles need to be considered strongly when connecting content and navigation. It might be best to build narratives into the experience to motivate your reader/user, to encourage them to investigate further and create their own singular, meaningful experience from your site.

References

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing,  Hillsdale, NJ : L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991. 147-168     

Goodwin, David. “Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation.” Journal of Technical Writing and Documentation, Vol. 21(2) 1991. 99-115

Haas, C, Flower, L. “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 2, May 1998. 167-183

Miller, Carolyn, R.  “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.”  College English, Vol. 40, No. 6, February 1979. 610-617

Ong, Walter. “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” Unknown Source, 1975. 9-21

Redish, Janice, C. “Understanding Readers.” Techniques for Technical Communicators, Ed. Barnum, Carol, M. Carliner, Saul. New York: Macmillian, 1993. 15-41