Revising Functional Documents: The Scenario Principle—Flower, Hayes, and Swarts

Flower, Hayes, and Swarts attempt to answer two research questions:

1. What would a reader-based revision of a Federal regulation look like? What do readers need?
   
2. What kinds of revisions do expert writers make when they revise a Federal regulation? How do they meet the readers’ needs? (42)

The authors conduct two qualitative descriptive case studies analyzing reading and revising strategies applied to a piece of Federal regulation, a functional document that people read “not merely to learn information, but in order to do something” (41). Both studies involve the scenario principle which states functional documents “should be structured around a human agent performing actions in a particularized situation” (42, 54).

Study 1: Analyzing the Needs of Readers

The primary object of study is the reader and what is needed in order to read a Federal regulation governing the Small Business and Capital Ownership Development Program. Protocol analysis is used to observe the objects of study, a method that collects tape-recorded transcripts of subjects reading aloud and paraphrasing meaning as they read. By using protocol analysis, the researchers are able to observe instances in the regulation where readers must pause and revise what is read in order to understand it. 

Hypothesis: “[I]f there were consistent patterns to our readers’ ‘revisions,’ these might suggest what sort of revisions the writers of these regulations should be making” (42).

Subject Selection: A representative sample of small business people who probably could not afford legal interpretation of the regulation. Made up of three people.

Coding System: Readers’ revisionary statements were coded into metastatements (unrelated comments) and content-related statements (comments interpreting the meaning of the regulation OR comments translating the regulation into an understandable form). Statements were further classified as structural, retrieval, and/or scenario statements. Clauses were the unit of measurement (simpler than T-Unit Analysis).

Scenario statements were the most frequent reader revision: “in trying to understand the text they frequently recoded it in order to form a concrete story or event by creating a condition/action sequence or by supplying agents and action” (45).

One questionable aspect of the method: It is not explicitly clear who or how many did the coding.

Result: The frequency of readers’ scenario statement revisions suggests the Federal regulation needs to be restructured around the readers’ search for answers in order to be functional.

Study 2: Analyzing the Nature of Writers’ Revisions

The primary objects of study are clauses and headings containing human focus in old and revised regulations.

Hypothesis: “[P]ublished revisions made by expert regulation writers reflect the heavy use of scenarios” (49).

Subject Selection: The regulation from Study 1 represents the old which the researchers knew is difficult to read. The Health Education Assistance Loan regulation represents the revised which is praised as easy to read.

Another questionable aspect of the method: Are these representative samples? What is difficult and easy?

Data Analysis: For the analysis of clauses, comparable segments were selected and counted for clauses containing human-centered discussions. For analysis of headers, four readers were instructed to identify old, concept-centered, definition headers and revised, human-centered scenario headers.

Yet another questionable aspect: No mention is made of who the four header readers are or how they were selected.

Result: “[E]xpert government writers and revisers seem to provide that human focus throughout their prose, not only in their sentences but even in their headings” (52).

Practical Revision Strategies

The researchers name the scenario principle a practical principle that is flexible in application to make reader-based, human-centered revisions to all levels of a functional document. Three levels of application include:

Top level: Organize information around 1. actions people take rather than definitions, 2. answering the reader’s questions, and 3. the reader’s need for specific information (54).

Local level: Use 1. examples and cues, 2. concrete situations and subsequent actions people take, and 3. operational definitions (55).

Grammatical level: Write sentences with 1) agents and actions and 2) human agents (56).

They are wary of their generalization of the application of the scenario principle to functional documents. They mention the notion needs further “detailed linguistic analysis” and it is only a “working hypothesis” (54, 56).

Conclusion

Flowers, Hayes, and Swarts conclude the article with a hypothesis for further research based on their results: “writers and revisers must find ways to create a reader-based structure of information in a text designed around its function, and around the comprehension strategies readers bring to it” (57). 

Flower, Linda, John R. Hayes, and  Heidi Swarts. “Revising Functional Documents: The Scenario Principle.” New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. Farmingdale NY: Baywood, 1983. 41-58.