Explaining how to use a telephone

For our next example we turn to the rather different document type of in-structions for installing a household cordless telephone and its associated

‘charger units’. An extract from a page from such a document is shown in Figure 4.10. Again, both the rhetorical structure and the layout structure are relatively straightforward. We shorten the exposition for this example, therefore, by briefly describing the structures involved and then proceeding directly to the contrast.

First, the layout elements of the segment include 4 main blocks, demar-cated by horizontal separator lines and including explicit ordering informa-tion via large font numbers. These blocks include text, sometimes in bold, sometimes in a mixture of bold to begin and regular font to continue. In one case a line drawing of a plug being inserted into an electric wall socket is included; in another case there is a boxed text block in a much smaller type face. These layout blocks appear to occupy the left-hand column of a two column area model dividing the page approximately equally horizontally.

In the upper right grid-cell is another line drawing of the ‘base unit’ of the telephone. Finally, there is a right-justified section heading on top of the basic cell structure and, above that to the left, a running head for this part of the instruction manual.

The relationship of the drawing(s) to the text is interesting both in terms of the layout and the rhetorical relations. In terms of layout the drawing appears decomposable into two parts, linked both semiotically and actually by the cable drawn between plug and ‘base unit’. The part depicting the plug and wall socket intrudes so far into the cell of the element numbered 2, however, that for layout purposes it must be considered as part of that element. The strong horizontal alignment of the other part of the drawing, the base unit itself, and the lines of text and framing lines of the element numbered 1 also strongly suggests a layout connection. The ‘NOTE’ text on the right-hand side of the page is a little far from the drawing of the base unit to be assigned unequivocally to the same layout element, although the right-hand cable shown in the drawing serves as a connecting line. Least problematic is the smaller boxed paragraph under the element numbered 3: this is clearly part of that element in terms of layout. Combining these considerations gives the layout structure shown in abbreviated form to the left of Figure 4.11.

Figure 4.10 Instructions for setting up a phone; used by permission

The rhetorical organisation of the information shown in the extract is sim-ply aSEQUENCE. This is quite typical of instruction manuals where some aspect of the functioning of a device is first identified (here: “connecting the base unit and chargers”) and then the steps toENABLE that action are presented in sequence. Subsidiary information, of an enabling or back-ground nature, may occur as further satellites to the nuclei of those actions.

Without a further analysis of the meanings of the elements presented on the page, we can take the layout structure as directly suggesting a corre-sponding rhetorical organisation. We propose that this is commonly what readers in fact do: they are attempting to discern the overall and detailed communicative intent of a page of information and use the perceived layout of that page as a constraining form for likely rhetorical relations. This cor-responding rhetorical structure is shown to the right of Figure 4.11. Here we can see that there is a direct one-to-one relationship between the hierar-chical structure of the layout and the hierarhierar-chical structure of the rhetorical organisation.

Figure 4.11 Layout structure and a corresponding rhetorical structure for the telephone page extract

Unfortunately, when we read the contents of the information expressed in these layout elements, we find that the actually intended rhetorical or-ganisation has to be somewhat different from this. In particular, there is no direct rhetorical relationship between the text under step 1 and the drawing to its right—this drawing is actually more related to step 2. Moreover, the drawing under step 2 is actually more closely related to the actions to be performed under step 3. This can be determined by following more pre-cisely the multimodal references across graphics and text in the distinct steps. Step 2, for example, refers to the “back of the base unit”, which is only shown in the top-right line drawing; while step 3 refers to the “mains adapter” and “mains socket”, which are only shown in the drawing under step 2. In addition, the main adaptor part number shown in the legal in-formation of step 3 only appears in the line drawing of step 2. In order to successfully interpret the page, therefore, a reader needs to construct not the rhetorical structure shown in Figure 4.11 but that shown in Figure 4.12, and this is very different from that suggested by the layout structure.

It would seem then that in this case the multiple constraints imposed by the material being presented and other practical constraints on production have combined to give rise to a non-optimal design solution. For example, simply moving the drawing of the plug down in the layout to occupy the cell-space of step 3 rather than step 2 as the rhetorical organisation calls for would itself cause problems since the legal information in the inset box has also to be placed somewhere here. We can see from the intended rhetor-ical structure that step 3 is the most rhetorrhetor-ically ‘overladen’ part of the instruction sequence and its presentation has been ‘solved’ by distributing its information more broadly around the page. This has led consequently to

Figure 4.12 Intended rhetorical structure for the telephone page extract

a less accurate rendition of the intended rhetorical organisation, which may in turn lead to confusion on the part of the reader.

Despite this mismatch, the instructions as designed appear well struc-tured and straightforward. We must, therefore, be cautious concerning the import of such appearances. It is already known from studies of textbooks that readers can be completely unaware of how poorly they have understood presented material. In such cases, ‘good’ design, in the sense of design that gives an impression of clarity, is not sufficient. Schriver discusses, for ex-ample, results from Glenberg, Wilkinson and Epstein (1982) and others concerning what they term an ‘illusion of knowing’:

“Poorly designed textbooks can create more than one kind of problem for read-ers. . . at times we may overestimate how well we understand. . . College stu-dents. . . who read texts in which experimenters had ‘planted’ contradictions failed to notice the contradictions. Surprisingly, after having read contradictory material, students rated themselves as feeling ‘very certain’ they understood the text. In fact, students had overlooked the contradictions and had answered many of the comprehension questions incorrectly.” (Schriver 1997, p226)

There must therefore also be evaluations of design in terms of the correct-ness of presentations and an explicit analysis of the intended rhetorical or-ganisation and its correspondence with layout structure is one way of sup-porting this.

4.5 Conclusion

In Chapter 1 we saw how Bernhardt (1985) proposed a continuum across document types concerning how explicitly the documents belonging to any

given type used visual resources for the expression of their content (cf. Fig-ure 1.3). In this chapter, we have refined this observation with particular reference to rhetorical organisation. Here again there is a continuum of relationships between text, image and layout. From any rhetorical organisa-tion for a document, more or less of that structure may be taken up visually or textually. Some documents may use the spatial mode to bring out details of their rhetorical organisation; other might rely instead on the linguistic mode to signal that organisation. Newer documents tend to make more varied use of the spatial possibilities available to them.

We can characterise this more explicitly in terms of distinct semiotic modes that have developed for information presentation and which are now all commonly employed within multimodal documents. Figure 4.13 illus-trates three such modes that are particularly relevant: one concerned with the sequentiality of text, one with temporal sequentiality, and one with spa-tial contiguity. This can be seen as an extension of previous discussions of how the modes of ‘multimodality’ combine and which modes are in-volved (cf. St¨ockl 2004b).

Figure 4.13 Three semiotic modes commonly deployed within document pages

As discussed in Chapter 2, the semiotic mode of linear written text is found whenever it is the one-dimensional line of the developing text that provides the basic organising scheme. Figures, pictures, diagrams tend in this mode to be situated ‘near’ to their referring text or to rely on explicit textual cross-references via document deixis (cf. Paraboni and van Deemter 2002). The spatial nature of the page does not carry significant meanings in its own right. Rhetorical organisation in this text-flow mode governs selection of conjunctions and other grammatical structures and extended

‘macro-punctuation’ (cf. Power et al. 2003 and Section 2.5.3).

A similar but semiotically distinct mode is used to organise sequences of graphical elements rather than text. We can term this image-flow in analogy to the linear text-flow mode. Within image-flow graphical elements are set

out one after the other as found in comics and similar picture sequences (cf.

McCloud 1994). The temporal sequence is used to carry a range of ad-ditional meanings over and above those in the contributing images. The relations holding between successive elements in such image-flows have been analysed from several perspectives; they also overlap with the kinds of relations that can be observed in film (for extensive references and dis-cussion, see: Bateman 2007). We will not discuss this mode any further here, however; we simply note that such elements also commonly appear as contributions to multimodal documents alongside, and in combination with, text-flow elements.

When a document starts to utilise the full two-dimensional spatial extent of the page for expressing rhetorical and other functional organisations, we move into a different semiotic mode: one which we term page-flow. Page-flow can combine elements in any of the semiotic modes appearing on a page, including text-flow, diagrams, graphs and so on. It adds to the indi-vidual contributions of these elements the possibility of a rhetorical unity supporting the communicative intentions of the document. And so, to docu-ments in this mode, we use the multimodal extension to rhetorical structure that we have introduced in this chapter. Without this level of description, we are not in a position to explicate many of the spatial distribution deci-sions taken in page-based documents—although this distribution must also be considered in terms of any canvas constraints that are applicable, such as the grids and other properties of the page.

It is also only when we have a detailed view of multimodal rhetorical structure that we can start setting out the alternatives for expression that are open to designers. This is one of the main reasons that we require an account of rhetoric in our overall account. In addition, we have seen how in-tended rhetorical organisation and the relationships communicated spatially can diverge—usually resulting in incorrect or ambiguous interpretations of the document in question. This divergence shows the necessity of main-taining rhetorical structure as an independent contribution to a complete document analysis.

At the present time it is an open question as to just how much of the detail of rhetorical organisation is expressible visually. If we cannot make the fine distinctions that are commonly drawn linguistically in the visual mode then we will not require the full apparatus of RST. The resources which are actually employed in any document and the ways in which they are distributed around the semiotic modes mobilised will also depend to a large extent on the type of document considered. For this we need to consider the influence of document genres, which we now turn to in the following chapter.

5

Multimodal Documents