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Stella Rush explained about her reference to schemas that
<snip>...give people a structure on which to hang new knowledge--that is,
>help people figure out how to relate new knowledge to what they already
>know.
To which Bill Blinn added:
>This sounds to me like an approach based on schema theory rather than
>the theory itself. I can't remember the two researchers who worked with
>the well-know "restaurant script" were...<snip>
Roger C. Schank's name is often associated with the original restaurant
script story. He was involved in some of the early attempts to program
computers to generate stories. In attempting to program computers to write
stories, he and his associates discovered there's a lot of tacit knowledge
of particular situations which goes unexplained in stories.
He has gone so far as to conclude that people actually think in stories
(*Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory*).
Schank doesn't use the term schema, but rather script, which he defines as
"a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well-understood
situation....Life experience means quite often knowing how to act and how
others will act in given stereotypical situations. That knowledge is
called a script." (p. 7)
If I have not distorted his intention in my summary here, he says in this
book that all people reason from experience, and that we store experience
in memory as story. This explains in part why stories from other cultures
often don't make sense to us. We haven't the experience of the script to
understand all the unstated things in the story.
The notion of scripts or schemas provide one reason why technical writers
need to keep the audience in mind -- or rather, the scripts of their
audience. This notion also provides some incite into why the technical
person who designed a piece of equipment or code may not be the best person
to write the instructions for how to use it. The users may well be coming
from a background with different scripts -- different cultures -- if you
will.
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