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Identifying The 'Aboutness' Of Highly Structured Expository Documents, N. Stuart Hawthorne

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The increases in commercial documentation over the past 50 years and the permeation of computers into all areas of business has led to a major increase in the individual's reading load. This thesis proposes a method of writing procedural documentation to enable rapid appreciation of the 'aboutness' of such material, thus making the reading task more efficient. The method is derived from a document structure which is used as a basis for the development of rules to construct a hierarchy of in-text headings which encapsulates the 'aboutness' of the text. Reading efficiency is achieved through needing to only interpret the …