Why Good Writing Is Easier to Understand

Writing is "good" when it anticipates the knowledge that its readers will bring to it-the questions they will implicitly ask-and tailors its content and form accordingly. A large part of this tailoring involves the careful use of "discourse clues": choices of wording, patterns of phrasing, and specific discourse connectives that signal the structure and intent of a text to the audience. We begin by examining in instance of bad writing, rewriting it to illustrate the importance of discourse conventions in avoiding false interpretations. We continue with an example of a larger scale discourse pattern, and show how the recognition of such patterns captures important inferences "for free", making a general-purpose deduction component largely unnecessary. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the design of a language understanding system presently under development that uses discourse cluer. and commonsense reasoning to direct the text understanding process in a flexible an opportunistic manner.