The Influence of Semantics and Syntax on What Readers Remember

Your English teachers told you to avoid passive voice, and now your computer grammar checkers also warn you to avoid passive voice. But sometimes when you revise a passive voice sentence that flows smoothly into an active voice sentence, you realize that your new sentence flows less smoothly. Do you ever wonder whether the reader is really going to understand the sentence better or remember more information because of your revision? And what about those debates you have with colleagues about where to place information you particularly want readers to remember? Do you place that information first or last in the passage? Do either or both locations really help the reader hang on to an idea? When technical writers and editors compose or edit text, they continually make decisions that concern semantics—the meaning their words convey—and syntax—the way the words are arranged. However, writers and editors must often base these decisions on assumptions that have not been tested with technically oriented adult readers or technical documents, or perhaps not at all. Thus the actions writers and editors take may not in fact have the expected effects on readers’ performance. In this study, we set out to explore the accuracy of certain assumptions we all depend on by examining the relationship of specific semantic and syntactic text characteristics to what information readers recall. We also examine some characteristics of readers that influence their interpretation of text. Our hope is that this study will provide the groundwork for further investigation. Once we determine how individual variables or combinations of variables affect reader performance, as technical writers and editors we can maximize the effectiveness of our efforts by focusing on those variables that have the greatest impact on readers’ recall of information. In this article, we look at some previous research on reader performance, describe our study design, present and discuss our results, draw conclusions and address their implications, and finally suggest some directions for future study.