3. Pecking

3. Pecking

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Though I can no longer remember when or by whom, sometime during my education I was taught that skimming was bad but that pecking was worse, one a venial and the other a mortal sin on the occasion of reading. If you skimmed a text, you missed its details but followed its structure and at least came away with a sense of how the text cohered, sometimes a more cogent sense of the whole than readers who got lost its details could derive. But, if you pecked at a text, reading randomly, sometimes here, sometimes there in no particular sequence, then you had no hope of discovering the text’s coherence.

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The coherence of the text is usually regarded as a crucial issue. For persons trained in formalism and for their students, texts are “organic unities.” Writers are taught to strive for coherence and readers expect it. If a textual detail does not fit in to the text’s semantic network, writers remove it and readers find it a flaw. Good writing is often distinguished from bad writing on the grounds of coherence. Readers rank texts on the criteria of semantic harmony.

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For most readers, incoherent texts are unintelligible. But, we might ask who establishes what coheres with what? The author(s) or the reader(s). Obviously, not all texts need to be read in the same way. Reading reference works contrasts with reading the single-authored, unified texts whose coherence is deemed to be the consequence of the insightful ordering of a writer’s intention. As the research Charney reviews confirms, the more the intended structure can be discerned, the greater the corresponding sense the text makes (238). By comparison, the order of essays in a reference work-corresponds to the conventions that facilitate the retrieval of the information desired by the person who consulted it. The coherence of “the text” in constructive hyper-reading—as in the use of reference works—is more the result of the reader than of the writer. As a consequence, pecking is an entirely suitable technique. In constructive hyper-reading the reader governs the reading and imposes coherence by reassembling textual fragments as a newly created text that often displaces the intention the authors of the textual fragments incorporated in it may have had.