Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis

Rating:
Summary: A fun path of entry into basic text analysis
Review: In this slender and thoroughly enjoyable volume, Michael Hoey provides an intimate introduction to the mechanisms of interaction and interactivity in texts via some choice examples. Hoey hypothesizes a four-fold model comprising writer, author, audience, and reader, all of whom interact in complex but systematic ways within textual interaction. The thread running through the work is that coherence is a sine qua non for texts, and it is around and against coherence that the most germane questions about interaction - via the threat of incoherence - are posed.

Hoey's reader is not overburdened with technical vocabulary, but is lead through the material by the author's enlightened voice, and plenty of illustrative illustrations. While he makes no claim to uncover universals of text reading behaviors, Hoey does succeed in illuminating many aspects of writer signalling and reader expectation in English texts. The approach, I have found, is particularly useful to anyone studying text analysis in order to support the development of educational materials.

One section of the book I found fascinating is the chapter titled "Interaction in text - the larger perspective," in which Hoey uses a neat little trick molded in the spirit of Objective Hermeneutics. By taking just 2 sentences from a feature article (73 sentences long, on British dormouse ecology) he demonstrates the power of textual signals to set off reader expectations and activate standardized schemas. Hoey presented his 2 sentences to an ecology expert and a classicist, and asked each to anticipate what questions they thought the remainer of the article would probably answer. Surprisingly, both readers anticipated the majority of topics that would be addressed, and still more surprising to me, the classicist anticipated the higher number - 78 percent. This shows the integrity of the text-form, the embeddedness of reader expectations, and perhaps the superior rhetorical ability of the classicist to anticipate where the text is going - irrespective of subject-matter expertise. Hoey also reminds us that "the successful predictions of the two informants are a measure of the writer's own success at predicting what his writers will want to know. Either way it would seem that the whole development of the article is already enshrined in embryo in its beginning" (p. 43). I have used this test when developing scientific features for the Web, and the questions generated are indispensable in ensuring that the text answers the questions readers really want to know. It also moves us away from traditionally narrow notions of "targeting an audience" toward more stable generic forms of text, especially for informative discourse.

Another central concept presented by Hoey is the idea of the "colony" text - a theoretical model that is useful in describing texts such as till receipts, phone books, classified ads, and other non-linear, non-narrative texts such as database reports and dynamic Web pages. Colony texts often emerge from multiple authors, or are generated completely automatically, and readers of colony texts know that the "metaphysics of presence" is suspended, or at least disjunctive with respect to space-time. While the idea cannot be done justice here, the theoretical concept of the colony is an extremely useful one that will become more so as text analysts focus increasingly on dynamically-generated content from systems such as XML-based content- and document-management systems. Coherence, intertextuality, and reader expectations within colony texts are likely to be a growing research area in applied text analysis.

Hoey also treats culturally specific and scripted text forms, such as Problem-Solution patterns, Goal-Achievement patterns, and Desire-Arousal-Fulfilment pattern. His treatment here, as well, is erudite and interesting, and fortified all the more by his concise illustrations for support.

All in all, a fun book that is likely to inspire research and keep one asking questions. What's more, it's cleverly written, sharp, and self-referentially one step ahead of its critics. What critics?