Designing Usable Texts

75243.

Preface

At one time it was fashionable for prophets of the electronic age to predict the demise of text in favor of electronic audiovisual media. Instead, it is now apparent that these media themselves generate large quantities of text, on which their own operation and maintenance depend. For example, a colleague recently bought a portable computer that arrived with a manual twice its size in volume and weight.

Even the most ordinary domestic appliances, such as washing machines, now require quite complex programming to operate their microprocessor controls, where once there was just a single switch. And the literacy component of industrial jobs continues to grow, too. Technical manuals are long and difficult, and for large and complex systems they can weigh literally thousands of pounds: In the military context this poses something of a problem for field repairs—I once read of a battle tank that came equipped with an armor-plated microfiche reader and a complete set of microfilm manuals.

It is not in dispute that texts exist for, among other things, the purpose of communication—messages are recorded in them to be interpreted at a later date—but in practice there is rather more to it than that. Although recall of text content is still the dominant criterion encountered in the empirical research literature, there is a growing realization among researchers that it is often inappropriate. Even when we leave aside the large proportion of texts that are simply for the purpose of entertainment, only a small number of the functional texts that remain are intended to be learned, and few are designed to be read in the conventional sense of a linear processing from beginning to end. Hence the title of this volume; it addresses the issue not only of comprehensible texts, but of their usability in the fullest sense.

The alternative is to see texts as just one component of a complete system: the text, the user, the environment, and the purposive context. This suggests, though, that if research outcomes are themselves to be usable by text producers, they need to be context-sensitive in the way they are determined and the way they are expressed. Data from reductionist scientific experiments may support theories that may in turn inform practice, but the link is often tenuous. In the practical world, knowledge has traditionally been passed on aphoristically, as rules, guidelines, and examples. However, text technologies are changing so fast that there is no time for these to evolve in the old way. Research—of the right kind—has never been needed more in the world of practice.

Text can be considered as arguments, as linguistic entities, as programs of instruction, as components of a system, mechanism, task, or procedure, and even as art objects. Each text is simultaneously part of a number of different systems: A typical college textbook, for example, can be seen as part of its author’s corpus of work, as part of the discipline of psychology or education, as part of the English-speaking culture, and as part of the students’ task environment. Functional texts thus have too many facets for any one approach or level of analysis to tackle comprehensively.

It is because of the broadness of the usability criterion that the authors of this volume represent a number of special fields from both academic and practical traditions. They are traditions that have sometimes been antagonistic—the one caricatured as insensitive to practical matters of text production, the other as unreasoning and arbitrary. However, those on either side who exhibit these tendencies err in similar ways: Sidetracked into methodological or aesthetic debate, they lose sight of the real-world goals and applications of their professions. One of the problems is that we lack a common language for discussing functional text. Psychologists traditionally deal in theories, writers and designers in feelings. Whether these are manifested in contrived stimulus materials for experiments or in prize-winning creative works, they each refer to a tidy world of ideal texts. This book has been compiled, though, in the belief that recommendations about text design from whatever source must be soundly argued, properly tested, consistent with the research evidence, but also realistic, affordable, and intuitively acceptable. It is for this reason that the authors in this volume address themselves directly to the analysis of textual communication processes in the real world of publishing systems and work sites.

In the introductory chapter, Olson places text in the general theoretical framework of communications in which text is an utterance. The dilemma faced by the writer–designer and the competence he or she must possess become evident in the contrast of design requirements for text and for oral utterances. Part II, Authoring, Editing, and the Production Process, examines what writers do and how they can be trained (Felker et al.; Orna), what editors do (Wright) and perhaps what they should do (Carter), and appropriate and inappropriate use of linguistic guidelines (Frase et al.; Duffy). In Part III, several alternative design systems and strategies for instructional text (Anderson and Armbruster), reference text (Horn), and procedural text (Smillie), and for the use of pictorial representation in all of these text types (Twyman) are presented. In Part IV, Identifying Information Requirements, the focus is on how an understanding of the use of text can be a basis for the design of text. Sticht provides a theoretical perspective on literacy and the use of text. Schumacher and Waller discuss alternative text-evaluation strategies that have or may have practical usefulness, and Kern provides a strong case for what might be called the experimental-ethnography approach to text evaluation.

The typography of the volume conforms to the standards of The Educational Technology Series. We would like to thank the authors for their patience and cooperation with us as we muddled through the trans-Atlantic editorial process. The opportunities for providing us with editorial guidelines were many, and we appreciate their resistance to temptation. We are grateful to Elizabeth Orna for compiling the index for us and we would also like to express our appreciation to Cindy Thomas Duffy and Jenny Waller for their patience and encouragement throughout this endeavor.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

Outline

Chapter 1: On the Designing and Understanding of Written Texts

CHAPTER 1

On the Designing and Understanding of Written Texts

DAVID R. OLSON

Publisher Summary

The discussions of texts and their uses tend to hide one fundamental consideration: texts are one side of a very basic system of communication by means of ordinary language. In an analysis of everyday discourse, it is relatively easy to keep track of the primary social relation that is maintained between conversational partners and to note that language is simply their means for mediating their interactions and sharing their intentions. Many of the misperceptions of texts could be avoided if one realizes that fundamentally texts mediate a reader and a writer, even if the writer frequently loses track of his or her audience and even if reader frequently forgets that the text being read is, basically, merely the expression of some person. To handle the question of how readers understand and use text, a theory of the comprehension of utterness and texts is required.

INTRODUCTION

Three issues appropriately dominate the chapters in this book. The first has to do with the relations between the structures of texts and the mental resources, processes, goals, and interests of their readers-users. The second issue has to do with the production of comprehensible, utilizable texts, through the creation, design, and management of text structure, from the typographic and linguistic to textual and discourse levels. The third issue has to do with more immediate practical design problems and their relation to the preceding theoretical problems.

CONSTRUCTING AND USING TEXTS

Discussions of texts and their uses tend to hide one fundamental consideration: texts are one side of a very basic system—that of communication by means of ordinary language. In an analysis of everyday discourse, it is relatively easy to keep track of the primary social relation that is maintained between conversational partners and to note that language is simply their means for mediating their interactions and sharing their intentions. Many of our misperceptions of texts could be avoided if we realized that fundamentally texts mediate a reader and a writer, even if the writer frequently loses track of his or her audience and even if the reader frequently forgets that the text being read is, basically, merely the expression of some person.

If we recognize that texts are extended utterances, we see our way past the first hurdle. The differentiation of an author from his or her text allows unprecedented scope for revision and design, but on the other hand, it creates the illusion of autonomy, authority, and objectivity, as we see presently. Nevertheless, a text is ultimately not different from the utterance of a speech act that is directed from one person to another in the attempt to construct a social relationship, to issue a command, to make a request, to get the listener to change a belief, and so on.

Once texts are seen as derivative of ordinary uses of language, we can lay to rest the naively optimistic assumption that authors and designers can create, by means of successive approximations and empirical trial and error, universally effective texts. It is, of course, simply nonsense that one could create a symbol, let alone a text, that had the effect of being not only immediately comprehensible but completely persuasive to any reader. One may recall the attempts in the 1940s by the armed forces to prevent the spread of venereal diseases through the construction of a persuasive film showing the horrors of disease and some means for avoiding it. Yet, for rather obvious reasons, the film had no effect whatever. It was not basically a problem of communication, but rather of the competing goals and interests of the viewers. Ultimately, I believe, the only way to make a person do something is through force, not communication. What, then, can design be expected to do to improve the usability of texts?

The problem in designing texts is to attempt to achieve some goals without seriously losing access to others. The problem is analogous to designing a car with both good acceleration and low fuel consumption; the two goals are somewhat incompatible. There is no one stone that can kill these two birds.

What then are some options and how do we choose among them? Fortunately, they are relatively clear. We can make better texts that make fewer assumptions about the readers, or we can train better readers so that they can cope with almost any texts. Hence, discussions of text design are complementary to those of increasing literacy skills. Let us see if we can specify more fully how these considerations are interdependent.

Any symbolic form makes some assumption about its users. The once-popular view that pictorial media are self-explanatory is no longer plausible. Twyman points out in Chapter 11 of the present volume, symbols of any greater complexity than those portraying simple objects require knowledge of the symbolic form to be intelligible. Sir Ernst Gombrich (1974) made this point in his analysis of the picture left on the moon by an Apollo mission, to be read or deciphered by itinerant space men: The upraised hand on the pictured man and woman, for example, is simply a pictorial convention; unless the reader knows the convention for greeting, the symbol is meaningless. Every symbol makes assumptions about the comprehender (or reader of a text). Psychologists may be expected to help discover how readers understand and use texts? One of the contributions of psychologists is to discover how various readers understand and interpret written texts and thereby make clear just what writers can safely assume about readers.

A MODEL OF COMPREHENSION

To handle the question of how readers understand and use text, we need a richer theory of the comprehension of utterances and texts. We may begin with the following:

and elaborate it thus:

We shall consider only the logical form of the relation, a relation that is symmetrical for the speaker and hearer if we assume that what the reader recovers is the speaker’s intention. The critical dimensions are shown in Figure 1 in terms of the relationship between the semantic structure (S), which is sometimes called the text structure, sometimes the sentence meaning, and sometimes the meaning in the text; the context or knowledge of the world or simply a possible word (PW); and the intended meaning (M), which is sometimes called either the speaker’s meaning, the speaker’s intention, or sometimes simply the interpreted or comprehended meaning.

Fig. 1 The relation between a sentence and its context in the specification of meaning.

Informally, we may describe these constituents as (1) what we say, (2) a context or a possible word, and (3) what we mean. Formally, the claim is that S is a function from PW to M. That is, for any value of PW, S will determine the possible meanings M. Conversely S without PW does not mean anything.

Before I use this theory to comment on the theories and arguments raised in this book, let me make clear that the theory has both a decent pedigree and some empirical support. The pedigree arises from combining Bierwisch’s formal semantic theory with Searle’s analysis of speech acts (see Olson & Hildyard, 1983). The data come from some experiments (which I do not discuss in detail here) that my colleagues—Angela Hildyard, Nancy Torrance, Hillel Goelman—and I have carried out at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (See Olson, Torrance & Hildyard, 1984) as well as from other researchers.

First, let me show that S and M are interdependent in just the way I have indicated. Consider the following linguistic structures:

These sentences illustrate the fact that if you alter PW, the meaning of the S changes correspondingly. Such observations in the early days of transformational grammar were raised (by people like me) to show that sentences did not have fixed meaning. It is the meaning M in Figure 1 that depends on context PW, not the S (what transformational linguists call linguistic meaning). By differentiating S from M we can eat our cake and have it too. We can say that meaning depends on context and yet admit that a sentence has a linguistic form that is generated by the formal rules described by linguists. Moreover, we can discuss differences in the PW entertained or presupposed by the writer and the PW in which the reader understands the text; these are the central issues in designing usable texts.

TEXT STRUCTURES AND THE CONTEXTS OF COMPREHENSION

The chapters in this book can be arranged in terms of the preceding model. On the one hand we have those that deal primarily with the structure of text—from the graphemic, to the lexical, to the syntactic and textual levels-structures examined especially in the present volume by Anderson and Armbruster (Chapter 8), by Duffy (Chapter 6), by Frase, Macdonald, and Keenan (Chapter 5), by Horn (Chapter 9), and by Smillie (Chapter 10). All the procedures they discuss for clarifying the structure of the text for what, in Figure 1, I have called What is said are both enlightening and useful, and we consider them in more detail presently. But as I have already suggested, many alterations in text, especially attempts to make texts autonomous expressions of meaning, makes particularly strong assumptions about the reader’s linguistic knowledge and about the reader’s knowledge of the PW.

On the other side of the model, in the present volume, we have Wright’s chapter (4), with its emphasis on understanding; Kern’s (Chapter 13), Smillie’s (Chapter 10), and Schumacher’s and Waller’s (Chapter 14) discussion of user-centered as opposed to text-centered texts; and Orna’s (Chapter 2) and Wright’s (Chapter 4), concern for audience.¹ In fact, most authors have sympathy both for the structure of texts and for their usefulness and comprehensibility by user, an issue of particular concern to the chapters by Carter (7) and Sticht (12). Hence, it is clear that the dominant issue of all of these chapters is that of relationship between the structure of texts and their processing and use by readers. Let us see if we can formalize or at least tidy up the relations between these considerations.

First, notice that texts play one part (the part subject to design, admittedly) but only one part in the determination of meaning. Sentences and texts may be seen as linguistic structures that in a broad sense include phonological-graphemic, typographic, syntactic, lexical, and textual structures. These structures, together with the context or PW, mean something to a comprehender (or for that matter a producer). If a listener-reader fails to arrive at an M, either he or she does not know the rules of S (i.e., he or she has limited literacy-linguistic skills); S is faulty as Anderson and Armbruster (Chapter 8) show in their examples; or the listener-reader does not share the appropriate PW. Any use of S, however, assumes that the user knows the structure of S-that is he or she knows how S expresses M in PW. If one does not, one cannot determine M. However, even if one knows S, unless one shares PW, one cannot construct M. Furthermore, as more is known about the readers’ PW, the writer can eliminate some of the structures of S because the reader is able to make the required assumptions. Winograd (1980) has discussed this in some detail. Suppose one were reading a text: Tommy had just been given a new set of blocks. He was opening the box when he saw Jimmy coming in. Winograd continues, There is no mention of what is in the box-no clue as to what box it is at all. But a person reading the text makes the immediate assumption that the box contains the set of blocks. We can do this because we know that new items often come in boxes, and that opening the box is a usual thing to do (p. 215). Similar arguments have been made by Bransford and Franks (1971) and Paris (1975).

Such inferences are reliably made by readers and listeners; writers can often count on readers to make just the appropriate inferences. Suppose, to take another example, a reader read this text: The policeman drew his revolver and fired. The burglar slumped to the floor. The reader is invited to make the inference that the policeman shot the burglar, even though the text does not explicitly say so, and even though it is logically possible that the burglar merely fainted from fright, and so on. All elaborated explanations have to end somewhere and that end point is where the reader can contribute the critical knowledge from his or her PW. To tell the reader the obvious is as inconsiderate as to overlook telling the essentials.

Now let us apply this to our texts. What we need, of course, to mediate an S, and its M is the provision of an adequate context or PW. S means M only in the PW. The text writer-producer constructs a text, an S, that in some PW expresses M. The readers have their own PWs that they use to determine an M from S. Does the writer correctly anticipate the readers’ PW? Not if the reader does not completely share the set of beliefs, prior knowledge, and so on that make up the PW in which S specifies M for the writer. There are two options open. Either the writer can try to guess the PW of the reader, a possibility we examine presently, or the writer can make fewer assumptions about the reader’s prior knowledge and attempt to build up a common PW through the use of text. Anderson and Armbruster (Chapter 8) suggest, as do Horn (Chapter 9) and Smillie (Chapter 10), that the writer may completely determine the reader’s PW via the text so that the reader will, given S, recover M. Certainly, that is one important function of text but that assumes an extremely high degree of literacy on the part of the reader. This point requires some elaboration.

EXPLICIT TEXTS AND CONTEXT-DEPENDENT TEXTS

In ordinary discourse, the listener-reader already brings a PW, composed of some prior knowledge and some contextual knowledge, and the sentence assumes or presupposes that exact PW, and so the listener-reader can recover the intended meaning. But writers can rarely, if ever, correctly guess the prior knowledge, let alone the purpose and goals, held by a reader. Thus, as Smillie, Anderson and Armbruster, and Horn propose, texts may be constructed that do not presuppose an appropriate PW but that actually construct the appropriate context or PW through the text. Let us call such texts explicit texts. In such texts, the burden of comprehension falls on the interpretation of S rather than on the PW previously held by the listener. Put more simply, if you want the listener to understand S appropriately, then teach him or her the appropriate PW through the text, rather than find a PW already in the listener’s mind, into which S can be tied. In this case, S is primary; whereas in ordinary discourse, PW—The expectancies, beliefs, interests of the listener—is primary. Nonetheless, PW can to some extent be constructed through S—That is through the text—and to the extent that that is required, the structure of the text-at a logical, syntactic, lexical, and textual level—will be crucial. To oversimplify, the more the text is to teach a reader, the greater the weight that falls onto the S of the text and the less it falls on the listener’s existing PW.

But note that as the burden of constructing the PW falls increasingly on S, the greater the demands placed on the literacy skills of the reader. Hence, explicit text is needed at precisely the point that it is least useful—for the poor or uninformed reader. Texts that assume the least prior knowledge of PW by the reader necessarily assume the greatest degree of knowledge of S—the highest levels of literary skills. This is the primary limitation of explicit logical prose text.

Thus, if a writer attempts to construct the PW through text, an enormous burden falls on the linguistic skills of the reader. For some ideas, however, there is no alternative; new theories, for example, require readers to reassemble PW on the basis of the literal meaning of the text. Understandably, such texts are difficult to read.

Let us, then, back away from the attempt to make S an adequate and explicit representation of meaning and see what we can do from the reader’s side. The reader already perceives a PW through which he or she can interpret a text. A live speaker knowing the listener’s PW can usually generate an S to specify an intended meaning. But, in principle, a text writer cannot know a reader’s PW—the reader is separated in time and space and in many cases is not even known to the writer except in the most general terms. Nonetheless, to some extent the writer can anticipate the PW of many readers, as did the Gideon Bible in my hotel room, which says:

Need a tonic? Read Psalm 27.

Lonely? Read Psalm 23.

(I had the feeling the writer of the questions did not anticipate my needs exactly.)

It is doubtful if a text writer can ever anticipate the PWs of all readers, especially those of lively readers who are likely to try out their own ideas, who read for their own purposes, and so on. But by knowing probable knowledge and expectancies, and problems of a certain class of readers, one can create texts that exploit as far as possible the PW of that class of readers. Surely such texts are easier to read and to use than those that make no assumptions about prior PW of readers or, worse still, wrongly assume it.

This point is central to Wright’s comments (Chapter 4 in the present volume) on contextualizing text. Formal text does not easily provide (construct) its own context, and thus the reader is left with the job of providing a PW in which the formal text (S) can mean something. The reader can read what is said and yet not know what is meant. Comprehension of S is immensely facilitated if the reader already knows the context or PW; and a good text writer will play into the PW existing in the reader. The formal structure will then be understood by seeing how it maps into and extends an already known PW. Easy texts, in a word, are appropriate to the reader’s existing PW.

In summary, then, text is a function from a PW to a meaning. If readers know the relevant PW, comprehension is easy; if too difficult, readers may find it easier to simply memorize S rather than to build the appropriate PW. To make text comprehension easy you must appeal to the reader’s PW.

But written texts, unlike oral language, cannot be tailored easily, if ever, to the reader’s PW. Readers bring PW to text. That is our dilemma. To return to our automobile analogy, How do you balance the goal of good acceleration with that of low gasoline consumption? One does not solve such a problem, one accepts a workable compromise. I suggest that good text preserves logical form such that, given the logical form and given high levels of linguistic and literacy skill, a diligent reader could imagine a PW of which that text is an appropriate description. On the other hand, good texts are also geared to many diverse PWs and hence to many uses by readers.

That, then, is our dilemma. On the one hand, we can design highly structured explicit texts that explicitly create a PW, largely ignoring the PWs that readers bring to the text. In this case readers will need extremely high degrees of linguistic competence to deal with them, and that is a level of competence we can expect only in experts. Hence such texts are of restricted usefulness.

On the other hand, we can guess, sometimes correctly, the PW of the readers and write texts that map directly into their existing PWs. Such texts are readily comprehended, but because a writer can only guess a particular PW of any particular readers, such texts are again of restricted usefulness. We minimize our losses by anticipating reader’s PW and by attempting to make texts as autonomous and self-explanatory as possible. Because it is so difficult to know just what knowledge and interest a reader has, text writers may be tempted to ignore the reader and simply construct explicit logical texts. Contrary to my earlier views on the meaning in the text (Olson, 1977) this seems not to be a realistic goal.

Such explicit logical texts are primarily of use to the expert reader who already possesses the basic stock of concepts, not to the average reader. To be useful to the average user, the text simultaneously should be geared to may PWs and hence to many uses. If texts are intended for children, for example, they should raise many considerations in addition to the logical form of the argument. In discussing the role of the Krebcycle in metabolism, texts for children should not only spell out the equations but also raise such questions as Who was Kreb? Why did he attack such a question? What was he up to? Is his a good theory? How do we know? How was the theory tested? Do scientists secrete theories? Is this a problem area in science, or is it a closed case? And in schools, at least, I would have these ideas discussed by teachers as well as read by students.

As an aside, we may note that universal literacy encouraged the idea of the individual silent reader—everyone tied to his or her own book. Why not go back, for some situations at least, to the manuscript era when the one copy of the book was chained to the pulpit, and it was assumed that the average reader would often need a clergyman to help in understanding it correctly. The teacher’s role in this scenario is to show the student how to correctly interpret the text. But if texts are to stand up to careful, critical reading, they must be informationally adequate and logically coherent as Anderson and Armbruster (Chapter 8 in the present volume) and Horn (Chapter 9) show. Stripping text of its complex concepts merely to meet the requirements of readibility formulas degrades rather than simplifies text.

OPTIMAL DESIGN OF TEXTS

Now, let us see how our general schema may apply to the design of S, that is, the design of text. Recall that all design in S assumes the reader’s knowledge of the rules of S but it does not necessarily presuppose PW. However, good design is a matter of interrelating the two. Good design consists of finding an appropriate form S to express a M in a PW. Finding an appropriate form to represent a problem, as Twyman (Chapter 11 in the present volume), Sticht, (Chapter 12), and Smillie (Chapter 10) suggest, is to make the problem solvable. This is no less true for pictures than for words or for flow charts. Recall the story of Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish neurologist who in the early part of the century won the Nobel prize for his descriptions of the neuron. Others looked at neurons with a microscope but they saw only what for them resembled a mass of felt. Cajal, looked at the same mass but saw interrelated neurons, of which he made remarkable drawings.² Cajal claimed that he succeeded at this task because of his early training as an artist, a career that had been forceably ended by his father’s decision that being a physician was a good career while being an artist was not. This training in the visual arts led him to see the structure of nerve cells where others could not. To this day Cajal’s drawings serve as models in many neurology texts (Cajal, 1973).

The same point is true, I believe, for the creation of texts. Authors, editors, and publishers are looking for optimal forms of expression that will most comprehensibly express M in PW. That is the heart of designing usable text. This is what Twyman (Chapter 11 in the present volume) looks for in his study of depictions. A similar point was both stated and illustrated by Alexander Pope (1711/1966) in his Essay on Criticism when he urged that The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Notice how the word sense literally echoes the word sound so that both literally and metaphorically the point is made. It is not enough that meaning is expressed; it is a matter of finding the characteristics of the form of expression that highlight the points being raised. The central problem, from this perspective, is the representation problem—the construction of appropriate descriptions or depictions.

DESIGN VERSUS THEORY

The relation between theory and practice is of central concern to several chapters of this volume, particularly those of Wright (Chapter 4), Duffy (Chapter 6), Carter (Chapter 7), and Kern (Chapter 13). As is well known, there is a voluminous and thriving literature on the processes of comprehension and production of both oral language and written texts. That research is devoted to constructing a general yet detailed model of the primary structures and procedures involved in using language; and most models, certainly the one I discussed in the preceding, differentiate at least two and sometimes three major constituents. Such an analysis may be elaborated as a theory of comprehension. But all of the chapters in this volume agree that such a theory cannot be taken as a program for designing usable texts. As Wright (Chapter 4), Smillie (Chapter 10), Sticht (Chapter 12), and others argue, theory cannot be equated with design. Wright (1978) asks, What is it that after many years of research so little progress has been made in the development of specifications for designing written communications so that they are easily understood? (p. 254). There are at least two answers. The first is that we were naive to believe that they would. To show this, I would like to make a brief detour through the domains of theories of reading and design for teaching reading, where this exact problem has risen.

Theories of reading and research on reading processing have reached the state of a fine art, the same art roughly as the field of language comprehension. The theoretical and empirical issues are interesting and challenging, and we have every reason to expect that added research will yield increased understanding of both the nature of literacy and of learning to read. But what about the design problem-for example, the problem of designing reading programs that will successfully teach children to read?

Helen Popp (1975) reviewed the overwhelming wealth of reading programs developed by publishers to teach reading. Textbooks, and especially the graded reading-series, have improved gradually since Comenius introduced them into the common (public) schools in the seventeenth century. All of them have evolved to meet a small set of criteria-controlled levels of difficulty, appropriate subject matter, accompanying reference books, appropriate accompanying activities, and the inevitable workbooks. Texts, including reading series, are a highly evolved technology that, over time, have become quite well adapted to the needs and demands on the child, the teacher, and the classroom. And they have taken the form they now possess, not particularly because of Comenius’s education theory or, for that matter, Piaget’s or Bruner’s, but because they represent workable solutions to a number of practical constraints. Anderson and Armbruster’s (Chapter 8), Frase, Macdonald, and Keenan’s (Chapter 5), Horn’s (Chapter 9), and Smillie’s (Chapter 10) programs are particularly practically oriented and are similarly independent of psychological theory. Theory tends to follow rather than lead such programs.

Design considerations rather than theory have led to the development of many different reading series, all of which are quite good if quite similar. Further, the more revolutionary a reading series is claimed to be, the less likely it is to be good. What is more, the reading theories that attempt to rationalize the particular virtues of various reading series are largely trivial. Series vary in matters of taste more than in matters of substance. Textbooks, including reading series, represent the accumulation of practical experience in the form of an evolved technology of design, and although we may hope that future discoveries in human cognition will substantially alter our conception of the practical art of pedagogy, the contributions of cognitive psychology to date have been modest.

While all reading series succeed in the same way, they also fail in the same way. In that they are mass produced for the general audience, they fail to address the particular child in the personal, direct way that speech does; that is, there is no way for it to address the particular PW of the individual child. There is no possibility of the text speaking to the child and the child speaking back and, in the process, negotiating the meanings of the expressions or the particular Ms involved, a process of particular importance to young children and for speakers of nonstandard dialects and of divergent social experience. The preparation of a different early reader for each child, with the child’s help, is a form of individualization that, despite its advocacy by such reformers as Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Sybil Marshall, has not been widely adopted. The reason is that individualized texts would be neither profitable for publishers nor labor-saving for teachers. Without genuine individualization (not the spurious individualization achieved by ability groupings), the best primers in the world cannot alter the one dominant feature that differentiates printed text from oral, conversational utterances, namely, that the linguistic conventions employed and the PWs specified are lodged unalterably in the text itself. As Socrates argued, if you ask a text what it means, it merely repeats itself. The text makes no rhetorical allowances for the individual scanning of it, and the child will have to come to understand that text; unlike speech, neither the code nor the content is