Full Description
Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals is written for an audience with a general interest in readability studies, linguistics and technical writing. With the main emphasis on technical manuals the book is primarily targeted at those who have a special interest in the design and use of utility texts and how these texts are received and understood by a multifaceted audience. Accessibility is not a new research area and many explanations have been offered over the past years as to why non-experts often have difficulties in comprehending texts written by technological experts. This book offers a new approach to accessibility studies by exploring not only style, but also attitudes to style, by asking text consumers which style they prefer for different parts of the manual. A key role is played by the Systemic Functional Linguistics' notion of grammatical metaphor, a stylistic choice that is commonly used in technical literature. Grammatical metaphor — although apparently obstructing the comprehension process of some readers — is a common element in the preferred style that separates the 'insiders' from the 'outsiders'.
An explanation of this rather surprising result is offered by resorting to Critical Discourse Analysis.
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
