All organizations and companies produce reams of documents, whether they are internal files, order forms, invoices, letters, manuals, memos and so on. Once these documents were paper–based, but now documentation within an organization can take many forms, whether they are Web-based, email-based or print-based. Document management is therefore concerned with the storage, retrieval and dissemination f such material.
The past 40 years have seen a larger number of innovations in writing than perhaps in the entire history of writing. Over the long run paragraph not has much of a future in technical writing. The information block will be the idea that survives. Writers need to write so people can scan and skip. That means that a writer needs to write so people don’t have to read everything. This is something of a paradox.
It will be convenient for people not to read everything and that people must have the freedom no to read everything and probably always have read in a non-linear way. But with hypertext they skip all over the place.
There is also the “writing code� activity domain: coding. Many developers don’t consider JavaScript or HTML coding, so they rarely document such code. Thoroughly documenting the JavaScript code either through written documents or code comments not only help the author, but also provides future guidance for developers working with the code.
So every coder must document his code with comments. Written documentation is good, but it is useful to include documentation in the actual code – just in case the written documents cannot be found. Documenting the code is also good practice and it s easy to do on-the-fly as the programmer is coding. Some languages like Java and C# provide special documentation features.
JavaScript does not include such features, but it is easily possible to include documentation with comments. Developing readable code is a continual process that any coder should follow on a daily basis. After all, documentation is abhorred by most developers, so going back and documenting code after a project is complete is not on anybody’s wish list. The programmer can include comments and consistently format the code to assist future developers charged with maintenance or changes.
Now let’s consider some major fact about reading and writing. A very controversial thesis is that the revolution in information and communication technology may soon turn writing into a relic of the past: it will be replaced by the automatic transcription of speech, whereas reading is here to stay. Can we reflect on the future with the help of tools developed within the cognitive and social sciences?
Some people are convinced that writing and reading will soon be things of the past, a cumbersome pair of prosthetic practices that, in retrospect, will come to be regarded as a mere parenthesis in human history. This has been argued in particular by William Crossman: “By enabling us to access stored information orally – aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for us to replace all written language with spoken language. We will able to store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we’re about to create oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological foundations� (“The Coming Age of talking Computers�).
If speech to text conversion technology proves effective and congenial people may end up giving up writing altogether without ever deciding to do so or even noticing that they have done so (just as many of us have, in fact, ceased to write by hand). The cumulative effect of such individual decisions at a cultural level is hard to predict, but it is likely to be considerable.
The fact that readers can see a whole page and readily access any other part of the text provides writes with opportunities not shared by speakers. Writers can use more complex sentences. They can highlight the organization of their text with paragraphs, titles, and subtitles. They can depart from a strict linear organization of the text by adding footers, cross-references, or appendixes. They can produce new kinds of objects that are at once linguistic and graphic, such as structured lists and tables.
Even in oral presentations, most teachers and lecturers have found it useful or even necessary to provide written text and other graphic documents for the audience to read or examine, in the form of writing on the blackboard, handouts, or, by now, screen projections. Many of the current forms and functions of writing take advantage of the short-term memory effects of a visual presentation. Possibly, some of these functions could be fulfilled by talking machines, but not all of them. For instance, it might be easier just to ask the machine to read a short dictionary entry than to look it up using the alphabetic order. On the other hand, browsing is, and is likely to remain, more effective when done visually than acoustically.
From a practical point of view, listening to a text is much slower than reading. It is also noisier. Possibly the stronger obstacle to the abandonment of reading is the role it lays, not in accessing texts, but in producing them. What we value most in the activity of writing is not the hand movements (or else typing would not have replaced handwriting to this extent) but the fact that we can read what we write as we write it.
All this considered it is quite implausible that the cumulative effect of individual decisions to use text-to-speech conversion will result in the replacement, at a societal level, of the activity of reading by the systematic use of text-to-speech technology.
Still, the generalization of the oral production of written texts is likely to have significant effects on the texts themselves. These effects might be on the subtle rather than on the dramatic side, and be therefore comparable to the effects of the progressive replacement of handwriting by typing, and then of simple typing by word processing. This move has favorable emergence of the development of new genres in a way that has not yet been systematically studied. The composition of written texts by means of the voice might have deeper effects.
Various forms of writing have resulted in some degree of divergence (varying from tongue to tongue) between oral and written dialects. Will a return to the natural organ of linguistic expression put an end to this divergence, or will it cause the emergence of new dialects?
The very symbols used in the different writing systems result from a compromise between the needs of the hand and those of the eye. Printing, and now the computer, has made possible the development f new characters, which, however, must still remain similar enough to handwritten ones. This constraint could altogether disappear; a new evolution of writing systems could emerge, exclusively guided by considerations of visual ergonomics and esthetics.
One can imagine anything. On the other hand, to speculate in a manner that is both informed and reasoned is difficult. Difficult nut not altogether impossible…
