Introduction

A few years ago, I had the very fortunate experience of being taught by my English as a Second Language (ESL) student how to teach her to read and write English. She had attended several ESL courses at a local community college and had practiced writing letters, sounding words and repeating specific phrases that were designed to help her in the grocery store, at the employment office and other day-to-day social situations. The problem with this situation was that her skills and knowledge never progressed as a result of these courses. Aside from the obvious issues of over-crowded classrooms and textbooks designed for a general audience and not for a student from a specific country from a specific economic background, the lessons were faulty because they were not germane to her life, specifically, and also because they did not facilitate her to engage with the text. For example, she had very little motivation to learn names of farm animals from the textbook, but had great motivation to learn the names of each body part as she had weekly visits to a doctor. Once the two of us determined what was of interest and important to her daily needs for reading, we were able to structure her lessons that would be most helpful to her. The result of her engagement with the engagement with the new lessons I taught was that she found motivation to learn and felt she was receiving a value in the process.

Although technical communication documents cannot possibly be tailored to exactly match the interest, reading level and many-faceted influences of a reader, they can I believe, take measures to engage the reader to believe that the information he or she is receiving from the document is valuable to their experience in some way. Jean-François Lyotard in his essay, "The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge" writes about the ownership of knowledge and how knowledge in modern society is being devalued and that "use-value" of knowledge is diminishing in information distribution and knowledge becomes a commodity.

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of the commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of value. Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its "use-value." (4-5)

For a technical communication document, this would mean that knowledge becomes a byproduct of reading a user's manual and not a source for valuable information. It is the value of the information that will motivate the reader. Our role as communicators is to relay valuable information that the reader might not have. Technical communication documents are created to provide the reader valuable information, a value that might not be sought out or one that is not worth the time to seek. In this statement, Lyotard provides a relationship why we want to be conscious of the fact that as communicators transmitting the information, we are transferring a knowledge that is valuable for the reader.

A subsequent result of the transmission of valuable knowledge is that a relationship of trust from reader to author is likely to develop. If a reader trusts the author, or the company whose name appears on a manual, likely, it will instill a relationship of longevity from reader to author and develop readership loyalty. This relationship of reader trust and loyalty would also be inclined to position the author in a more respected role in the technical communication discourse community as an effective communicator.

The purpose of technical communication, to relay information from author to reader, implies an agreement on some level from both the author and reader that a communication process will occur, and without this mutual agreement, the communication process is incomplete. I will cite examples from technical communication theorists that support my position that a "progressive text," as I will call it, can engage and educate readers throughout a document so that the reader comprehends information at a higher level toward the end of the document than where she began at the beginning of the document. I will use a computer manual to illustrate that current procedural documents do not accomplish this task and leave the reader feeling like I have not been engaged or valued as a reader and decreases the reader's incentive for seeking out additional documentation or information from manufacturer's website.

Literature review

The theorists I cite encompass both cognitivist and reader response models of writing, two camps of communication theory that are not known for agreeing on technical communication methods principally because they hold different perspectives on learning styles. The cognitive approach assumes that the reader role can be predicted by studying the audience who had previously read similar documents and writing to that audience. In this model, communication through cognitive analysis would need only to write to the known audience and communication would occur seamlessly with the reader understanding the author's point of view clearly, as in the windowpane theory. The reader response model charges that regardless of how well the readership can be defined, there is still a wide range of readers and their different responses and communication cannot be assured of a single interpretation. Multiple interpretations of the text are likely. Henceforth rhetorical and motivational writing is intended to unite a diverse audience to the author's intended reading.

However I believe different documents must be presented for different kinds of readers, so document writing must adapt to the suitable writing models, even if those models conflict with each other. Susan McLeod underpins this notion in "The Affective Domain and the Writing Process: Working Definitions." McLeod takes from Lev Vygotsky "that the views of both extremes--emphasizing only affect or cognition--are undesirable (1).

A progressive text could employ both models of writing. For example, a procedural guide would be written with a specific audience in mind and would correspondingly convey specific information to that audience very pragmatically regarding related product and procedural information. But multiple interpretations from a diverse audience who might not want or need the information cannot be predicted. McLeod continues her position that cognitive and reader response (or McLeod's affective) models need to be joined when writing and cites Wilbert McKeachie's address to the American Psychological Association when he said that "[I]f we are to understand the whole person, not just discrete phenomena, cognition must be viewed in concert with affect" (1). For a progressive text cognitive and reader response models are necessary. The cognitive method would transmit the basic and necessary information that would make up the fundamental transmission of the information. And to take into account an unknown readership, I believe rhetorical methods would create a document that could motivate and engage the reader to realize that the information received is valuable.

Goals and benefits

The intention of a progressive document is to write a text that in the opening sections defines the domain of the subject, vocabulary, jargon and tone of language. The writing would then progressively convey more complicated principles as the document developed by employing writing techniques in previous sections to build on that information to be able to explain more complex issues in later sections.

Benefits of writing a progressive document enable the author to communicate efficiently; double code language to write to multiple audiences; engage the reader, develop a relationship of trust wherein after reading the text, the reader has received valuable knowledge; and to increase the quality of work within the technical communication discourse community.

Two examples of this style might include a procedure written in two different ways. The first way to instruct would be to write a procedure that starts broad, defining the goals and procedures and becomes increasingly more detailed as procedure continues. The second is to begin with a detailed issue and build on that initial issue by expanding the issue and providing background information that may not have been sought, but are relevant to the success of the procedure.

A progressive text is designed to speak to a diverse audience by "double-coding" a document to make it easier to read for the more willing while at the same time creating a narrative and writing to the mock reader in a different voice that will engage the reader and create a feeling that knowledge has been conveyed, and that that knowledge is valuable. This value in turn can aid in their person's development personally, socially, professionally and so on.

I believe this approach to readers is able to accomplish several goals. The first and most is that to engage a reader is to develop a relationship where the reader feels like part of the communication process and feels like a value has been received and their time reading the document has been time well spent.

Reader roles

When writing a progressive document reader roles and a wide audience must be considered. I believe the reader is autonomous and chooses the level at which she will become involved with the text--regardless of how "engaging" or efficient the information is conveyed by the communicator. In his article, "Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation, David Goodwin explains reader roles in terms of actual, authorial and ideal readers (100-101).

The actual reader is usually defined as those flesh-and-blood individuals who buy, open, and read any printed materials. First and foremost, then, the actual reader is a concrete reality. He or she has specific habits, preferences, knowledge, and beliefs (100).

For a progressive text, this reader could be predicted and written to in a cognitive model of communication. He cites theorist's views of the reader roles including Walker Gibson and Walter Ong and continues his explanation of the authorial or implied reader role:

Conversely, the authorial reader is not a living person existing outside the text but a hypothetical, abstract, and generalized being postulated by, and existing solely within the text, and, to a significant extent, imposed on the actual audience (101).

Based on Goodwin's explanation, the authorial reader would also be considered in a progressive document as the unknown audience. An audience that can only be assumed that the message sent is the message received. Goodwin concludes his definition of reader roles with the ideal reader:

The authorial audience is almost always shades off into an ideal one. Under three conditions, the implied reader is one that completely accepts the author's stance, comprehends the author's stance, comprehends the author's code, and strives to achieve the author's goals. Booth underscores this point when he equates the "implied reader" with an "ideal interpreter": an audience which cooperates with the writer by adopting author-inscribed roles without any modification or resistance (101).

Goodwin returns to the actual reader to explain that "[a]ctual readers, however, frequently resist authorial roles, very often because they resent, disagree with, or feel confused by the ideals inherent in those roles" (101). The role of this real reader, an abstraction, represents the diverse range of interpretations that might need to be considered while writing a document intended to motivate the reader. Possible dissenting interpretations of the text that the author had not intended need to be addressed with rhetorical methods for motivating the reader. It is this inability to predict the reader response where a progressive text would write to engage the reader with the text and leave her with a sense that valuable information has been received.

Similarly, Walker Gibson describes in his essay, "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers," that there are different roles for readers and labels them "mock readers." The role for the mock reader is to wear the appropriate mask for the text that they are reading (2). In relation to the reader roles defined above, mock reader roles for audiences who are willing to engage with the text and will understand it on the level as the author intended and audiences who, if they do choose to engage with the text, may not accept the role of a willing reader or reject the message that the author had intended.

For the progressive text, it is important to engage the different mock readers with the appropriate communication models. In her article, "Contemporary Views of Audience: A Rhetorical Perspective," Mary B. Coney also agrees that the communication process is in part determined by the author-reader relationship.

There is emerging, however, a recognition that no matter how well known, defined, or closely analyzed an audience may be, the writer is still confronted with the problem of translating that knowledge into the composing process, of creating or 'invoking' an audience who can enter into a rhetorical relationship with the writer, of providing roles for that actual audience to enact during the course of reading. (332)

In this statement, Coney has provided the responsibility for the writer to engage the reader and keep her informed in the shifts and progression in the document that sets the framework for the reader's role in that scenario. The author and reader in this relationship seem to need to work collaboratively: the author to inform, engage, and write appropriately to who he thinks his audience is; and for the reader to also engage with the text that has been provided.

This collaborative effort is further explained by Carolyn R. Miller in "A Humanistic Rationale for Teaching Writing." Miller explains that the technical communication community is creating a direction for the reader to follow and develops the path for the reader to follow for the delivery of new information strategies. She explains her position: "[b]riefly summarized, it holds that whatever we know of reality is created by individual action and by communal assent. Reality cannot be separated from our knowledge of it; knowledge cannot be separated from the knower; the knower cannot be separated from a community" (615). For a progressive text, the author can assume that the reader is coming to the document for information which establishes the parameters for the community between author and reader. As the reader is engaged in the text, the relationship is established and the reader is able to follow the author's goals and intentions and so the reality of the progressive text becomes apparent and the text progresses, so too must the knowledge of the reader. The model of the progressive text suggests that the reader is asked to increase her level of knowledge on the subject and compound that new information to interpret and assimilate the following text.

Miller continues her explanation of information as it is dispersed and interpreted from the writer's point-of-view to the reader's interpretation:

Facts do no exist independently, waiting to be found and collected and systematized: facts are human constructions which presuppose theories. We bring to the world a set of innate and learned concepts which help us select, organize, and understand what we encounter (615).

Thus the author of a progressive text provides information from the technical communication community and translates it to the reader of known or diverse communities for the sake of distributing the value contained within the document. The reader's response is either to enable the effort of communication and recognize it as information that is valuable and is willing to engage with a progressively more complex document, or reject the text as uninteresting or confusing.

As the community is developed, so too must be the process by which the reader will engage with the text. It is then the responsibility of the author to engage the reader in a sustainable or on-going learning environment. An education learning theory proposed by Sanneke Bolhuis is self-directed lifelong learning and is described as "[t]he assumption is that it is best to reach the highest possible level of education, to which the idea of lifelong learning adds the requirement of continuing educational participation throughout life." Bolhuis also states that in a business environment, the transmission of information is essential when vast amounts of data must be conveyed. "This is only effective when enough people are able to create new knowledge and others are at least able to catch up with the changes that are brought about by a change in knowledge" (28). Working with this theory, the author of the progressive text would engage the reader and present information that would build upon itself and educate the reader as the text progressed.

Cognitive Progression

At the very basic level of instruction through communication, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver develop a method in The Mathematical Theory of Communication. The notion is that the author (the transmitter) should translate necessary information (the message) as clearly and precisely as possible so that the reader (the receiver) is provided all necessary data essentially from the text (the signal) alone (107). This pragmatic model is very much a cognitive design that would tend toward the direct dissemination of information in a document. This model would tend to work well in a progressive text to set the tone for the language, the jargon and description of the domain of the document. Using this basic principle, an author could create a very precise document that would provide a progressive approach to introducing new material for the reader and enable the reader to follow new material that was based on information presented in previous sections.

However other factors besides basic instruction for the transmission of information need to be considered, such as the level of prior knowledge with which the reader is entering. User interface designs have taken measures to relate to audiences and the user-response roles that need to be considered. The evolution of learning by a diverse audience is studied in the chapter "Thinking of users according to their stages of use" in the book User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn T. Hackos and Janice Redish. They describe how users at different informed stages of will interact with a design in different ways:

Users differ in their interactions with a product because of the specific tasks they do and the frequency and expertise with which they use the product. As we think of users in terms of frequency and expertise, we can characterize them as being in different "stages of use," from novice to expert (76).

Hackos and Redish provide groundwork for developing user interface designs for a population of users with different levels of knowledge. For the progressive text writing procedural documents would allow an author to construct a text for a diverse audience with varying degrees of knowledge. This could be done by double coding information. For the more expert reader, providing a set of resources on the same page as the instructions would fulfill the necessity for a value to have been received from the information; and the novice would still be given the full text of step-by-step instructions which would accomplish the use-knowledge value.

For example, a software manual from Adobe supplies text instructions with corresponding graphics to illustrate the design (User 97). However a more progressive design might incorporate actual examples of pages that had been designed well and poorly to give the more experienced reader a comparison for her document and how it might look. The novice reader would still be provided with valuable information on how to set up the page and the more expert reader would have resources that could be used to continue a learning process about the text and about the domain.

Reader Response Incentives

Although clear communication is certainly necessary in a progressive document so is the relationship between the author and reader and how the author can engage the reader. A diverse audience is likely to include a reader who does want the information, but needs to be engaged with the text. In a progressive text, the author not knowing the audience would need to find a way to communicate to an abstract audience. Walter J. Ong, S.J. extends the idea of Walker Gibson's mock reader to include a fictionalized author as well as a fictionalized reader, or "mock reader," and demonstrates this relationship in "The Writer's Audience is always a Fiction."

[The] writer must first construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role... [And] the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life (12).

Ong demonstrates the need for the author to be conscious of his potential reader and the responsibility of the reader to enact the role developed for her.

This type of author-reader relationship would be a key element in constructing progressive documents. Ong continues his explanation of reader responsibility:

"Readers over the ages have had to learn this game of literacy, how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read, or at least how to operate in terms of these projections. They have to know how to play the game of being a member of an audience that 'really' does not exist. And they have to adjust when the rules change" (12).

Assuming the reader would choose to take on the role that Ong describes, it would then be her responsibility to keep stay focused and mindful of the progression of the text.

But it is more than just creating the right role for the reader to follow and more than presenting the information in a logical progression for a diverse audience. Often, it can come to establishing a compelling narrative for the reader to follow and to want to participate in. To receive the value of the information within the text, the reader must feel like she has accomplished a process of learning and motivated to do so. Goodwin underpins this need for motivational learning:

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).

One way to do this is to create a role for the reader where she will be the hero during the course of learning a procedure is in the construction of scenarios for the reader called, "fabulas" wherein the reader is aware of the actions necessary, her involvement in the action and the desired outcome (105). The process of Goodwin's fabula is applied in stages:

In the primary fabula, the process of improvement usually involves "the fulfillment of a task," namely, the real reader's successful accomplishing of tasks specified by the software. In the secondary fabula, each task in a manual--the steps required to format a disk, for instance--functions as a separate narrative episode" (106).

The hopeful outcome of the fabula is that "the sum of the authorial reader's successes will add up to a successful outcome for the actual user" (106). For the progressive document, if the reader was able to use the Adobe manual to go through step-by-step instructions on how to create a well-designed page and model her own document after it, she would feel the reward and accomplishment of creating what was intended and the use-knowledge from the learning process.

It is with both cognitive and rhetorical techniques that an author can write a text that will inform and engage the reader. The basic delivery of information to a wide range of audiences is accomplished by providing different levels of information within the document which succeeds in transferring one component in the value of information being received. It is also the consideration to the reader's response and how to develop that relationship that can supply a valuable experience. If everyone played their part the end result would be that the author would be able to communicate clearly the facts of the document while encouraging a trusted relationship with the reader; and the reader in would in turn be willing to accept the information from the author's perspective and come away from the document feeling like the document was written for an actual reader and that it was also an informative valuable experience.

Works Cited

Bolhuis, Sanneke. 'Towards Process-Oriented Teaching for Self-Directed Lifelong Learning: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective.' Learning and Instruction, Vol. 13 Issue 3, Pgs. 327-347, June 2003.

Coney, Mary B. 'Technical Communication Theory: An Overview.' 1988.

Gibson, Walker 'Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.' 1950

Hackos, J.T., and Redish, J.C. 'User and Task Analysis for Interface Design.' John Wiley & Sons: New York. 1998

Lyotard, Jean-François. 'The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.' 1978.

McLeod, Susan. 'The Affective Domain and the Writing Process: Working Definitions.' JAC, (42) 1991.

Miller, Carolyn R. 'A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing.' 1979.

Ong, Walter J., S.J. 'The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction.' 1975.

Shannon, Claude and Warren Weaver. Selections from The Mathematical Theory of Communications. 1949.

'User's Guide.' Adobe PageMaker. version 6.0. Adobe Systems Incorporated 1993-1995.