On the Designing and Understanding of Written Texts

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.