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Readers need to have a presence in the text, if a conversation is to happen.
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Readers need to have a presence in the text, if a conversation is to happen.
Like me, you’ve probably noticed that it’s increasingly difficult to have a human-to-human conversation with the brands that supply your power, mobile phone, broadband or streaming service. There’s no phone number, and the chat feature connects you to a robot. Or you have to wait a very long time to get through – in at least one case (HP) this is known to be deliberate.1
In his classic book on communication theory, Colin Cherry2 talked about channels being more or less cooperative. For example, a conversation with a person is the archetypal cooperative medium, since the participants must agree on the topic, when to interrupt or give way, and it usually means you cooperate to come to a conclusion.
Perhaps we can’t do much about the economics of customer service, but information designers can make written text more cooperative.
An unsegmented written text gives the reader little option but to start at the beginning and continue reading until the end is reached – or to cope with the insecurity of random encounters, or to rely on the search bar alone.
But if we research people’s reading purposes, and provide access structures which meet their needs, the more cooperative the text becomes. We can speak of the reader having a presence in the text. Although they’re not literally present, someone has thought about their issues and questions.
1. Michael Crider (2025) HP forced callers to wait 15 minutes before connecting to support staff, PC World, 24 Feb 2025
2. Colin Cherry (1966) On human communication: a review, a survey and a criticism, 2nd
edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press