According to research in educational psychology, advance organizers lead to better learning and recall of information. In this research, the authors explored advance organizers from a business perspective, where larger documents are read under time pressure. Graphic and verbal advance organizers were manipulated into six versions of an advisory…

Two scientific ideas have been discerned in 20th century thinking: the structuralism common in Europe and the functionalism apparent in the United States. This paper presents two experiments in text analysis. One discusses the behaviorist writing style of Ernest Hemingway. It hypothesizes that since he is a behaviorist in practice, he should be a…

This article advances the bio-kinetic hypothesis that the complexity and nonlinear dynamics of language can be approached on the basis of the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm. It is shown that the derived AaO units rotate and that AaO-governed rotations include functions that can be imagined in real time, provided that a dot marking the state…

Discussion of page design for desktop publishing focuses on the importance of functional issues as opposed to aesthetic issues, and criticizes a previous article that stressed aesthetic issues. Topics discussed include balance, consistency in text structure, and how differences in layout affect the clarity of "The Declaration of…

Focuses on how typography and color complement and differ from each other in signaling an underlying content structure; the synergism between typography, color, and page layout (use of white space) that aids audience understanding and use; and the characteristics of typography and of color that are most important in these contexts. (SR)

Offers guidelines to help novice hypertext designers construct interfaces that are usable. Discusses windows versus frames, which interaction style to use, how to display text and buttons effectively, and how to use color and tables, diagrams, and animation effectively. (SR)

States that the transition from book to screen requires analytical comparison, and that the structure of the book cannot be translated to the screen without consideration of new spatial practices afforded by hypermedia "architexture." Discusses similarities between digital and printed documents and the implications for the digital…

Traces the career of Jack Stenner. Stenner made the empirical discovery that observable readability could be entirely predicted from word familiarity and sentence length, and applied this "Lexile Framework"(R) to books and readers. Discusses the use of the Lexile Framework as a way to target specific readers. (SLD)

Discusses the presence of graphic organization in books, which creates peculiar, constitutive reading signals regarding the nature of illustration. Analyzes the graphic organization of five different illustrations of poems. (PA)

As an instructional tool, graphic organizers (GOs) have been highly recommended and used in contemporary classrooms. Over the past decade, a number of concerns have been raised about claims for the effectiveness of GOs. These concerns involve the inconsistent research results on student improvements, the limitation in generalizability from…

The commentary argues for an understanding of how texts are put together that accounts for multimodality and draws on children's ways of being and doing in the home, their "habitus". It focuses on identities as socially situated. It argues that it is important to trace the process of sedimenting identities during text production. This offers a way…

Research shows that students who have a good understanding of narrative text structure have fewer problems comprehending stories. Research also suggests that many students require explicit instruction in how to comprehend this text type. While some children are able to figure out the more elaborate structure of narrative text on their own (i.e.,…

A reduced relative-main clause ambiguity occurs in sentences that begin with reduced relative clauses, as in "The hangman executed by the government was convicted of treason." This ambiguity has often been the focus of research designed to investigate the processes by which syntactic structures are built during sentence comprehension.…

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse--the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex…

Although the main characteristics of procedural discourse are well known, less is known about its various subtypes. Most of the data for the present paper are taken from Category E (skills, trades, and hobbies) in the Brown and LOB corpora, supplemented with examples from computer manuals and a manual for drivers. Following a survey of previous…