Writing Technology by Haas Christina

Author:Haas, Christina [Haas, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136687549
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

TEXT SENSE PROBLEMS OF COMPUTER WRITERS

As is often the case, new situations—in this case new technological contexts and situations for writing—bring to the fore aspects of writing that may have been there all along, but that have not been previously noticed. The notion of a sense of the text—something with which writers have presumably been operating all along—becomes obvious in such a new situation or context: the changed technological context of composing with word processing.

The phrase “a sense of the text” comes from writers themselves. In the interview studies described earlier (see chapter 3, this volume), writers told of their use of computers for writing, and most writers were positive and enthusiastic about the technologizing of their own writing processes. However, most of the writers mentioned problems as well, including the reading problems described in chapter 3.8 One of the reading problems that writers frequently mentioned was getting a sense of the text on-line; virtually every writer who mentioned text sense problems reported generating a hard copy printout of their texts in order to compensate for this problem. They often said things like, “I need to generate a hard copy to skim over—just to see where I’m going,” “It’s hard to get the center of gravity of the piece,” or “I just don’t have a sense of the text when I write on-line” (Haas, 1989c; Haas & Hayes, 1986).

What is a sense of the text? Text sense is a mental representation of the structure and meaning of a writer’s own text. It is primarily propositional in content, but includes spatial and temporal aspects as well. Although text sense—as an internal construction—is distinct from the written textual artifact, it is tied intimately to that artifact. Text sense is constructed in tandem with the written text and seems to include both a spatial memory of the written text and an episodic memory of its construction.

When writers talk about text sense they allude to the idea that the written textual artifact should “match” writers’ own intention—what Witte (1985) calls matching of the projected text, or pretext, to the written text. This kind of matching is necessary in order for writers to determine if the text needs reorganizations or other revisions. In addition, a sense of the text seems to be based on the ability to get a kind of distance, to step back and read the way an intended audience might. To detect a mismatch between intended text and actual text, a writer must have a representation not only of his or her intended or projected text, but also a representation of the actual text. This latter representation would seem to rely more on spatial cues and writers’ physical interactions with their texts. If reading to get a sense of the text is important for representing a text to oneself, it is much more closely tied to the compositional or meaning-making aspect of writing than are proofreading and checking format (see chapter 3, this volume) and therefore may be a more important problem for computer writers than are other computer reading problems.

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