Step 2: Make your writing readable

I chose an article about subtitling because last year I attended an interesting workshop during the French course. This article deals with the language learning possibilities linked to subtitling and captioning.

I am going to analyse its structure to see if the article is 'readable', that is, well structured, logical, cohesive, clear, precise, concise and coherent.

The essay does have an hourglass structure: as we immediately understand from the introduction, after an overview of the benefits and limitations of Audiovisual Material, the author moves to more detailed studies dealing with the relationship between second-language acquisition and captions. Finally, the essay broadens again to a more general perspective that is also a sort of conclusion.

There is a logical flow of ideas both in the macro-structure and inside the different parts of the body. When making a claim, there is always supporting detail conveying reliability and evidence.
For example:
"In addition to comprehension, captions can help with word recognition and
vocabulary building. [claim] Neuman and Koskinen conducted a nine-week experiment with 129 seventh and eighth grade ESL students..." (data)
Arguments are linked through metalinguistic signaling devices such as however, indeed, in addition, in short, thus etc.

The article is cohesive as it follows a reasoning and makes the effort of bringing the reader through this reasoning, so that he doesn't get lost. This is made possible thanks to references to previous ideas : "In spite of the beneficial aspects described above, captioning may not be suitable for..."
As for the logic, the metalinguistic segnaling devices are fundamental for a text to be cohesive. They can be found both inside and between sentences:
"All over the world access to vast amounts of culturally-rich, enjoyable material is
bound to increase with the expansion of satellite television and the Internet, as well
as the development of multimedia and DVDs. However, immersion in a flow of foreign
utterances, especially if they are far above the students’ listening comprehension
level, may do little to improve the viewers’ language skills."

The pattern 'claim-data' makes the text clear, without generalizations that usually make the reader cofused, especially if, as in this case, the text is an exposition of many different ideas.
Each paragraph introduces an idea and then develops it with supporting and/or opposing arguments.
The lexicon is precise, as it is supposed to be in academic (and then scientific) articles. The three main terms (subtitling, captioning and multimedia) are repeated when necessary and no synomyms are used.

The audience is composed of academic researchers dealing with pedagogical issues, especially with language acquisition. I can understand it from the lexicon, which is quite technical; from the references to specific authors and studies. Moreover, the author gives at the end some advice for further developments of her reasearch, addressing to the academic research community:
"It is hoped that current interest in multimedia will lead to the development of language curricula and self-learning programs integrating captions and subtitles while encouraging in-depth pedagogical research on their most effective use."

The article I chose is a good example of academic writing. I think however that those criteria should be applied to all kind of writing, even to blog posts. If we want our blogs to be readable, then we have to be concise, coherent and logic, otherwise our audience will get bored and above all confused. I personally will try to be more reader-oriented: I know that my audience are my peers, and that they know what we are talking about, what the subject is and what the tasks are. But I know that reading a post which is too long or that goes beyong the main theme can be annoying, so that we stop reading it even if there might have been something really interesting in it.
I'll do my best to make my posts as readable as possible :-)

Francesca.