Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals

Download or read book Accessibility and Acceptability in Technical Manuals written by Inger Lassen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.