Overview

"Preface We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the arst time. (T. S.Eliot, Four Quartets)1 Engaging in theoretical thought may be a rewarding and useful occupation that provides greater insight into aelds of particular interest. Along similar lines, writing a thesis of any kind is a long process of learning, and whoever engages in this process will realize that exploration never ends. Instead it will at times return to its point of departure and let the explorer ""know a place for the arst time"" as T. S. Eliot once said. Knowing a place for the arst time after having visited it before is a result of re-ection. And it is through re-ection that we are able to conceptualize ideas, which are generated through experience and later empirically tested through comparison and contrasting. Writing the present book has convinced me that there is a lot of truth in T. S. Eliot's observation. When I began this project, I had a working knowledge of the genre of technical manuals. Now - four years later - I realize that my understanding of the genre has changed. This does not mean that I can claim proaciency as expert writer of technical manuals, but my view of the genre is generally more varied than it was. In other words, I have revisited the place and recognized the sensation of knowing it for the arst time; it is however, important to bear in mind that a place may be revisited several times and that learning is an ongoing process. Another important point to stress is that learning processes - although mostly enjoyable - do have their mildly painful moments. And it is in such moments of slight distress that the advice and moral support of fellow human beings is highly appreciated. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the following friends, colleagues and associates, who in various ways helped the process along: Torben Borg (AAU), Jens Peter Hovels- (AAU), Henrik Kaagaard (AAU), J-rgen Bornaes, Lisbeth Kjeldgaard (Cosan Crisplant A/S, Aarhus), Michael Hougaard, Copenhagen, Dancall, Pandrup (now Bosch A/S), Guy Cook (Reading University), John Kirkman (Marlborough, UK), Heikki Nyyss-nen (Oulu University), 1. Cited in Kolb (1984, p. 20) Experiential learning. New Yersey, Prentice Hall x Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals Tim O'Connor (president of Dantekom), Mogens Bech, Alliance Sprogservice, Aarhus, Kirsten Aakjaer (LAK). And a group of math students from the Department of Electronic Systems, who assisted me in the analysis of data, using the programme CoCo: Birgit Mortensen, Niels Zeuthen, Henrik Thomsen, Bjarke Klein and Claus Dethlefsen. And I am also endebted to NORFA (Nordisk Forskerutdanningsakademi, Oslo), who made it possible for me to spend six weeks as visiting scholar at Oulu University in Finland and to Michael Halliday, who read through and gave invaluable comments to one of my papers during his visit to Aalborg and Copenhagen in 1997. And above all there is the professional assistance I received from Professor Torben Vestergaard, who was my supervisor all along and painstakingly read through all papers presented to him. I am grateful to him for many valuable comments, without which the book in its current form would not have come to fruition. And anally I owe a word of gratitude to my husband, Svend Aage Lassen, for specialist advice on technical issues and for the moral support he was able to o-er throughout the process. However, in spite of the many comments received, I was the person to decide whether to act upon them, and I consequently assume responsbility for any misrepresentations, errors or shortcomings in the present thesis. Inger Lassen Aalborg University 2002; Introduction In a world characterized by internationalization and cross-cultural communication, not only across national borders, but also across institutional boundaries, technical communication as a variety of Language for Speciac Purposes has become an increasingly important activity for technical specialists, translators and technical writers alike. This fact combined with burgeoning recognition that effective technical communication has a potential for saving time, costs and human lives has gradually led to growing interest in the aeld, and although, as a aeld of research, technical communication is still not developed to any signiacant degree, the past 20 years have seen a surge in terminology research as well as in translation studies in Denmark and abroad. However, in LSP research focusing on technical language, the emphasis has so far been on terminology. But everybody who reads technical language on a regular basis will accept that there is more to effective communication than terminology as also witnessed by the emergence of the UK-based plain language movement, who speak ardently in favour of improving the clarity, brevity, accuracy and accessibility of texts for the general public - objectives that cannot be fulalled without addressing also syntactic structures. Although the plain style movement has primarily focused on legal language, their ideas seem to have gained a foothold also in the universe of technical writing. But even if textbooks on technical language seem to respond to this general call for greater accessibility by recommending a plainer style that would ""remove technology from an elitist environment and give it to people"" (Killingsworth and Gilbertson, 1992: 139), many technical texts still court failure because readers and them incomprehensible. According to textbooks, the recommendations for clarity, brevity, accuracy and accessibility involve a style that makes use of personal pronouns, human subjects and active verbs. Such style would be personal rather than impersonal and sentences would be short rather than long. However, when it comes to technical texts written for the industrial market, more often than not, we will see a writing style that does not follow the recommendations. Now, to be effective, communication about technical matters will require technical knowledge, which is an asset held by the community of engineers in particular. Therefore engineers and other technical specialists representing the sphere of production will communicate with ease information that non-specialists will have di1culty in consuming, - an observation borne out by comments from students attending technical communi-xii Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals cation classes. The technical translator or communicator thus seems to be caught in the dilemma of having to choose between essentially two style options in an attempt to mediate between ""the production and consumption side"" of technical information, to use Killingsworth and Gilbertson's term (1992: 162). And mediation of this kind may further be constrained by possible con-icting interests of specialists and non-specialists since these discourse communities have different identities and goals. Faced with a similar dilemma as instructor of technical English classes, I have been concerned with the inevitable tension between norms prescribed by textbooks and merciless reality presented in natural texts - tension that I believe surfaces in the concept of text acceptability. For acceptability demarcates the zone within which the accessibility of texts can be improved or impaired, as the case may be, without sacriacing the quality of the text. Text quality is a concept that is discussed by Nordborg Nielsen (1994: 91-108) in relation to translation work. Nielsen suggests that to guarantee the quality of a translation, it is important to strive for neutrality - (Nordborg Nielsen's term for acceptability) - since translations which are not neutral will attract attention and therefore obstruct the reading process. If the syntactic structures of the source text are transferred into the target language, the result will cause the reader to react as follows: Jeg forst-ar nok, hvad der menes, men man siger ikke s-adan (I understand what is meant, but this is not the normal way of putting it) (ibid.: 93). As noted by Nordborg Nielsen, the situation of text quality obstructing text neutrality arises when the translator does not observe the norms and conventions applying to the target language. And so, by analogy, the neutrality of technical texts written in a target language is at stake if unconventional structures predominate. Against this background, the scope of manoevre of the technical communicator becomes extremely relevant. It is important to know to what extent the style of a text may be changed before it is considered unacceptable, thereby losing credibility as text. But it is equally important to know whether a change of style will actually make the text more accessible. To be able to answer these questions, the focus of research needs to be shifted in the direction of syntax - a shift that would at the same time help all a gap in the research activities traditionally associated with technical language. Keeping in mind the paradoxical mismatch between the style usually recommended by textbooks on technical English and the style prevailing in most technical literature, the questions relating to accessibility and acceptability were addressed from the angle of syntax. The purposes of this commitment were threefold: First, as an overall purpose, I wished to examine whether it is possible to say that certain style features are more accessible than others. Secondly, I intended to asses whether some style features are preferable to any alternative options in terms of acceptability, and, if possible, to explain why. I investigated these issues both from the angle xiii Introduction; of the text and from the angle of the reader/user by studying the interplay of accessibility and acceptability in texts extracted from technical manuals. These tasks were approached - partly by looking at stylistic features in the text under the umbrella term of grammatical metaphor - partly by looking at the situation of the reader by placing the texts analysed in the wider contexts of situation, culture and ideology. And as a third commitment, I assessed whether my andings were likely to have didactic implications for the technical communication class. Deanitions Till this moment I have been referring to accessibility, acceptability and style without making clear how these notions should be understood. For accessibility I shall adopt a deanition suggested by Klare (1963) for one of the potential meanings of the quasi-synonym readability which has been suggested to be: ""Ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing"". Acceptability, on the other hand, seems to involve the reader and the text in an interactive process, in which the reader assesses whether the text has qualities which make the style appropriate for the situation. The question remains whether such appropriateness - in addition to appropriateness of style - should also be taken to embrace grammatical aspects. However, in technical communication precision and accuracy are crucial factors, and since ungrammatical language may adversely in-uence comprehensibility, I shall take acceptability to denote grammatical acceptability as well as stylistic acceptability. Following De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) acceptability is then ""the text receiver's attitude in communication when they accept a given language conaguration as a cohesive and coherent text capable of utilization"". The third concept to be deaned is style. Traditionally, stylistics has been studied under the umbrella terms of literary stylistics and general stylistics. Of these I am concerned with the latter, which has been studied by a great many linguists including e.g. Crystal and Davy (1969), Carter and Nash (1990) Halliday (1994) and Enkvist (1971). In his essay On deaning Style (1971: 3-55), Enkvist refers to style as choice between words with similar meanings. The choice is determined by the context in which the utterance is made and he sees stylistic choice as ""the context-bound use of style markers"" (1971: 35), style markers being deaned as contextually bound linguistic elements. Another important point he makes is that for a text to be stylistically predictable, knowledge of the contextual hierarchy is needed, and it will be found that e.g. a socially deanable category of people will follow the same norm in terms of style (1971: 38). This means that texts written by authors with the same social background would display less xiv Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals textual variation measured in terms of density of a particular style feature, such as e.g. the active versus the passive voice (1971: 41). There is not necessarily any contradiction between Enkvist's deanition and deanitions suggested by critical discourse analysts (e.g. Hodge and Kress, 1988; Martin, 1992; Fairclough 1992). To Hodge and Kress (1988), style may be deaned as a cluster of signs - a deanition that Killingsworth and Gilbertson (1992: 138) take to heart and refer to as ""a cluster of textual traits"". Clusters of textual traits are important in that they shape style, which according to Killingsworth and Gilbertson (1992) is motivated by ""the social and historical development of technology"" on the one hand and ""the shared values and collective image of a group"" on the other. However, the difference between mainstream stylistics and stylistics as studied from the angle of critical discourse analysis is to be found in the notion of context. To the mainstream stylistician context involves situational aspects, whereas to the critical discourse analyst, context embraces also social structure enveloped in ideology. In the present study I have adopted the deanition suggested by Killingsworth and Gilbertson, bearing in mind their suggestion that style may be seen as 'a set of techniques' for achieving and presenting a collective image. The corollary is that style is inextricably bound up with conventions found in culture. It is the way we normally do things. But at the same time style plays an important part in building group identiacation with the purpose of establishing and maintaining values - a purpose emerging in the notion of ideology. Therefore, by studying the nature of ""clusters of textual traits"" I believe it will be possible to throw light on the relationship between language, situation, culture, ideology and social structure. Now, to study clusters of textual traits, a theory capable of providing a model for analysing text was needed and Systemic Functional Grammar seemed to be a relevant choice because Halliday's register dimensions of aeld, tenor and mode have been shown to in-uence the style of language, and grammatical metaphor, which is the main focus in this book, forms part of style. In Systemic Functional Linguistics such in-uence takes place in the context of situation. Secondly, to investigate acceptability, I devised a way of obtaining knowledge about reader attitudes. I approached this challenge through a questionnaire. Thirdly, because the interplay of accessibility and acceptability can only be studied through a theory that recognizes the interaction of reader and text, such a theory should allow for the in-uence of factors other than those identiaable within the context of situation. According to conventional wisdom among Systemic Functional Linguists, such factors are to be found in the context of culture, which is a level described in genre theory. However, I found that it would hardly be possible to offer a complete picture of the interplay between accessibility and acceptability without looking more closely at reader backgrounds and their anchorage in ideology, and for this xv Introduction purpose social semiotics as advocated by e.g. Hodge and Kress under the research discipline of critical discourse analysis seemed to be an appropriate choice for reasons that will become clearer as we move on. To sum up, the questions to be answered involved text analysis, discourse/genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis. These disciplines formed the research basis of this book as instances of applied linguistics, and the sum of analyses carried out will and an outlet in real writing situations. Therefore, in Chapter 1, as a starting point, I will offer a brief overview of the disciplines involved, and, moreover, provide a general introduction to the methodological considerations underlying my work. In Chapter 2, I offer an introduction to the theory behind text analysis in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and I introduce the notion of grammatical metaphor. In Chapter 3, I extend the theory on grammatical metaphor developed by Halliday, by suggesting that a distinction be made between syntagmatic and paradigmatic metaphor, and I categorize a number of new grammatical metaphor types under these two cover terms. The results from analysing a number of texts using the theory on grammatical metaphor introduced in Chapters 2 and 3 are shown, and a hypothesis is formed on the basis of the analyses made. In Chapter 4, I provide an overview of a number of genre analysis approaches with the purpose of identifying the approach that I and the most suitable. My conclusion is that a combination of genre analysis approaches by the SF linguists Martin, Eggins and Hasan provide a useful tool for analysing the genre of technical manuals. On the basis of genre theory combined with the data at hand, a new hypothesis is formed. Chapter V provides an introduction to methodological issues and describes the survey carried out, offering a versatile range of empirical data. Furthermore, the hypotheses formed in chapters III and IV are tested and the results discussed. In consequence of a number of questions arising from testing the hypotheses, various theories on the -ow of discourse are introduced and discussed in Chapter VI, with the purpose of identifying a suitable theory for analysing the interplay of grammatical metaphor and information -ow in the texts used. Chafe's theory, which is based on varying degrees of active consciousness, seems to be directly applicable to my data, and I therefore use a model based on this theory for analysing the -ow of discourse. The results of these analyses are shown and a third hypothesis is formed and tested in the same chapter. Chapter 7 takes the process in the direction of social semiotics and critical discourse analysis. The notions of culture and ideology are discussed and synthesized with other aspects of the survey to form a platform for a conclusion in Chapter 8."

Full Product Details

Author:   Inger Lassen (Aalborg University)
Publisher:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Imprint:   John Benjamins Publishing Co
Volume:   4
Weight:   0.485kg
ISBN:  

9789027232045

ISBN 10:   9027232040
Pages:   183
Publication Date:   01 May 2003
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

1. Preface; 2. Introduction; 3. 1. Research disciplines and methods; 4. 2. Field, tenor and mode dimensions; 5. 3. Register analysis; 6. 4. Categorizing text through genre analysis; 7. 5. Research methods and survey; 8. 6. Information structure; 9. 7. The technical manual as social semiotic; 10. 8. Discussion and conclusions; 11. References; 12. Appendix: Survey of writing style in technical manuals; 13. Name index; 14. Subject index

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