Visible Language

Presented here are some significant questions concerning the state of handwriting in infant and primary schools in England, and some possible answers to these questions. The ramifications may apply not only to English schools but schools of other countries as well. During the 1960s and 1970s in particular, handwriting became a forgotten craft in the schools, but improving the standards for both teachers and children is an important task that deserves attention and continuing concern in our fast-moving world.

Chinese passages were mutilated either in the right, left, upper, or lower halves and presented to native speakers to read. In Experiment 1 passages were read from left to right; while in Experiment 2 from top to bottom. Time taken to read them and errors were analyzed. Both measures showed that in both experiments the upper halves of characters are easier to read than the lower half, and right halves easier than left. Regression analysis method was used to examine effects of seven independent variables on reading accuracy of the characters. Among them, phonetic cue, symmetry, and number of strokes in the presented half were found to be significant factors.

The slash is appearing with increasing frequency in constructions like listener/speaker and memory/motor skills. It sometimes joins coordinate words that are alternatives in a sentence, but more often joins coordinates additively, especially nouns and noun compounds. Constructions with a slash are useful in providing lexical cohesion over extended passages. Like other devices in written English, they contribute to making information more integrated in writing than in speech.

Good technical writing demands clear and concise communication that allows readers to skim documents for efficient access to information. To aid technical writers many computer programs have been written to analyze writing style in the hopes of improving writing standards. These programs have tended to be of a numerical statistical nature, summarizing a document or predicting its “goodness.” We feel such programs hide more information than is advisable to help writers understand where and why their documents may have difficulties. After introducing the general concept of an abstraction of a document, we describe the other side of the text analysis coin: graphical displays of text that enhance structural components of a document. We describe two programs for graphical textual analysis: one generates displays of the logical structure of sections of a document; the other generates graphs of the complexity of the individual sentences. While these programs are not the final statement of abstract text analysis, they point a new direction in which we think writing aids should be going.

This article presents a walk-through of sample mini-lessons in an innovative method for teaching foreign language, along with brief remarks on its success in trial runs. The main innovation of the method is its use of reading as a starting point. The mini-lessons cover four stages: a pure hieroglyphic stage, a linearized hieroglyphical stage, a key-letter stage, and a phonetic stage. The method is directly applicable to language with different writing systems, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, or Chinese. But it also has radical implications for the teaching of foreign languages generally, since the sequencing of stages precisely reverses the accepted curricular ordering not only in all of these languages, but also in European languages and in English as a second language.

Despite the lack of direct empirical evidence on the issue, much comment from teacher educators has been made about the effect of word length on word recognition. A report of this relationship as found with fourth-grade children is reported here. The results of three tests of this relationship are reported: the percentages of these children’s correct reading of words of varying syllabic lengths; the correlation between these correct reading of words and their syllabic counts; and the correlation between these correct readings of words and their letter counts. None of these statistics supports the conclusion that there is a significant relationship between word length and word recognition.

In the future a book may be bought as a bubble-wrapped package containing a dust jacket together with a computer chip from which the reader prints out the text at home. Publishers may not stock inventory but print books when customers order them. Information will be acquired from computerized databanks, but literature and poetry will remain in printed form. The usage of language may be changing under the impact of staccato TV-talk. Although most cultural and political life has always taken place outside the home, the new electronic technology may be creating an isolating “living room culture.”

These are some of the possible effects of the new electronic technology on the future of books and book publishing that were discussed by a panel of diverse experts in a two-day seminar at the Jerusalem International Book Fair in late April 1983.