Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation

Abstract

Technical documents implicitly require readers to play out textually constructed roles in order to create meanings. Good technical writers create texts that motivate their readers by emplotting them in an attractive fabula, and, especially, in a role that not only achieves the ostensible purposes of the documentation but also allows the reader to function as the hero in a narrative of progress and improvement. Drawing on reader-response criticism and narratology, this article shows how a particular instructional software manual, the VP-Expert™ guide, instructs and motivates readers by using devices which resemble the conventions of heroic narrative.