A fascinating read and a great developer's resource

Reading "Language and Communication" is like being a golfing amateur being taken round a course you're trying to master by a championship pro - one with a sense of humour, a great stock of anecdotes and an intimate knowledge of the course. Ms Kukulska-Hulme sets-out to describe "a range of language and communication concepts to ... professionals working in other fields" by "describing, explaining and questioning". She succeeds marvellously, inviting us to consider what real people do, think and say, both in the real world and when they use computer applications: she teases-out the problems they might have and then gives a linguistic perspective. In the process, she introduces us to precise and often subtle ideas, but avoids blinding us with linguistic jargon. A central theme of the book is that when a user is trying to master a new user interface s/he is effectively learning a new language - a process that is often complicated because the user interface gives new meanings to words the user already knows. A simple example of the consequences is that any index to the help system is acting as the boundary between the user's existing use of language and that of the application - so the index should be based on the language that the user might use to ask questions about the application, rather than just including the words used in the interface itself. The journey through the book is a stimulating one which leaves you with a deeper and wider general understanding of the issues, and with a very useful set of intellectual handles on the problems - and you can let yourself go with the flow, because each chapter ends with a very helpful bullet-point summary of what's in it. Along the way, the author makes many references to the work of other linguists, and the bibliography is a wonderful catalogue of further reading - as is another appendix on sources such as collections of English texts available on the Internet. These text banks let you to check whether the rest of the English-speaking world really does use words in the same way as you (think they) do! The final chapter is called "Making it Work" and is a grand collection of practical advice, from the philosophical to nitty-gritty detail - again all in bullet-point form, and an ideal set of guidelines in the making. "Language and Communication" is a fascinating read and a great resource to be kept to hand.

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