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Our understanding of the world and the things in it, that we expect other people to share with us.
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Our understanding of the world and the things in it, that we expect other people to share with us.
No text contains all the information needed to process it. Instead it relies on the reader’s familiarity with concepts which are not explained. If I refer to a ‘bank account’, for example, I assume you know what a bank is, and what an account is. The term calls to mind a rich set of knowledge, experience and assumptions about the world, which enable you to process whatever I am saying about bank accounts.
Now think about a recent migrant filling in a government form, who may come across terms like ‘domiciled’ or ‘resident’ or ‘ordinarily resident’. They not only need to know the word, but also its legal status.
Problems occur when we make incorrect assumptions, and also when we use a word or idea that appears to belong to general world knowledge but which also has a special meaning. For example, the word ‘aggravating’ has come to mean ‘annoying’ but in the legal world retains its original meaning of ‘making something worse’.
This is a similar concept to schemas, but more specifically relates to how we understand language. This is a challenge for plain language advocates because the more they make explicit, the longer the text becomes.
Hayes, J R (1996) ‘A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing’;. In: C M Levy and S Ransdell (Eds), The Science of Writing. Erlbaum.
Ekaterina Ovchinnikova, Integration of World Knowledge for Natural Language Understanding. Atlantis Press, 2012