Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals: A Survey of Style and Grammatical MetaphorJohn Benjamins Publishing, 2003 - 183 pages "Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals" is written for an audience with a general interest in readability studies, linguistics and technical writing. With the main emphasis on technical manuals the book is primarily targeted at those who have a special interest in the design and use of utility texts and how these texts are received and understood by a multifaceted audience. Accessibility is not a new research area and many explanations have been offered over the past years as to why non-experts often have difficulties in comprehending texts written by technological experts. This book offers a new approach to accessibility studies by exploring not only style, but also attitudes to style, by asking text consumers which style they prefer for different parts of the manual. A key role is played by the Systemic Functional Linguistics' notion of grammatical metaphor, a stylistic choice that is commonly used in technical literature. Grammatical metaphor although apparently obstructing the comprehension process of some readers is a common element in the preferred style that separates the insiders from the outsiders . An explanation of this rather surprising result is offered by resorting to Critical Discourse Analysis. |
Contents
CHAPTER | 1 |
Field tenor and mode dimensions | 7 |
Towards a hypothesis on the relationship between grammatical | 15 |
Discussion of lexical density and grammatical intricacy at the levels of clause | 22 |
Categorization of types of grammatical metaphor | 31 |
22 | 49 |
Summary of metaphorical realizations 50 558 | 50 |
24 | 60 |
Linguistic realizations in the texts used | 76 |
31 | 80 |
Conclusions texts 16 accessibility | 97 |
accessibility and acceptability | 106 |
Interviews | 122 |
Results and discussion | 136 |
Logonomic systems and constraints on meaningmaking in technical | 154 |
169 | |
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Common terms and phrases
accessibility and acceptability attitudes background basis Bhatia Chafe changed text changed version Chapter combine harvester communicative purpose concept congruent culture discourse community Eggins ellipsis factual genres Functional Linguistics genre analysis GRAIN Grammatical Intricacy grammatical metaphor Halliday hypotactic hypothesis ideational ideology imperative imperative mood incidence of grammatical information structure interpretation language lexical density lexical items linguistic realizations Longacre macro-genre Martin meaning meaning-making metafunction metaphors to ranking modal modal verbs mood nominal group non-finite clauses notion occupational groups original text overview paradigmatic metaphor paratactic passive voice pattern possible preferred text Preferred versions priority questionnaire ranking clauses reader relationship relative majority respondents result short sentence version social semiotics stage STRAW WALKER style stylistic Swales syntagmatic and paradigmatic syntagmatic metaphor Systemic Functional Grammar Table technical manuals text accessibility text choices text preferences text versions textural metaphor theory tion TOP SIEVE translators typical variables verbs writing