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Subject:RE: Voice and environment From:"Mark L. Levinson" <nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 16 Oct 2001 15:00:38 +0200
I don't know how many years of schooling my grandfather had,
but he used to hum when he read. Grandma said he was reading
to himself aloud, but faster than pronunciation speed.
I don't hum but I have the impression of hearing a voice
that must be somehow foreshortened and I imagine that other
people's readervoices are foreshortened too: the voices do
not seem to hurry, but they manage to get through the text
far faster than any human mouth could pronounce it.
My techwriting tie-in is this: If I'm reading a manual and
the writer has plunked an icon into the middle of the sentence,
then the readervoice goes something like "Click mmrfmph and
select the appropriate option," because graphics are
unsubvocalizable. My favorite solution (at least back when
MS Word had easy-to-use frames rather than cumbersome text
boxes) was to use the name of the icon and include a labelled
picture of it near the margin. I'm afraid that if the reader,
lacking names, subvocalizes all the icons as mmrfmph and
shmnrgrz and smnmfrf, they may be a bit harder to remember.
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Mark L. Levinson - nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il - Herzlia, Israel
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Poetry: http://www.mp3.com/MarkLLevinson
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