From Genre to Text Critiquing in Multimodal Documents. Workshop on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse: Improving Text: From text structure to text type

Abstract: We suggest that the genre of multimodal documents resides in the way each document harmonises five levels of structure: content structure, rhetorical structure, layout structure, navigation structure, and linguistic structure. In addition, a further determinant of genre is the way in which documents satisfy three kinds of constraints: canvas constraints, production constraints, and consumption constraints. Document genres are then conceptualised as clusters of specifications composed of descriptions at each of the five levels that conform in characteristic ways to the three kinds of constraint. Using a worked example, we show how documents can be analysed in terms of these goals and constraints and ways in which the framework may be used as a means of critiquing document design, producing predictions for document usability. 1