Imi read photographed pages of the report and marked places where the wording was dense or assumed too much of the reader. I knew what I was trying to say because I had spent so long with the project. Her annotations let me see where a reader could get stuck even if the point made sense to me. I treated each mark as a reason to look again at the passage and work out what was causing the difficulty.
One comment was beside the distinction between staged and progressive disclosure. The original sentence asked the reader to understand two unfamiliar terms before giving them a reason to care about either. In the airport example I can start with the task. A traveller gets the current instruction first, then the next instruction as they move through the journey. They can also choose to open more detail, such as a sensory map. Putting those actions into the explanation makes the distinction easier to follow and shows why it matters to the design.
Imi also flagged the passage about scripting and camouflaging. I had used those terms to talk about an effort that can be hard for other people to see. A clearer explanation can say what someone may actually do, such as preparing what they will say in advance or adjusting how they act to meet others’ expectations. I needed to keep the qualification that people’s experiences differ. The point was to explain why someone who appears to be managing a journey independently may still be doing a lot of work.
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A reader’s confusion gives me a place to investigate. I still need to decide whether the wording, the structure or the original claim needs changing.
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Imi’s suggestion about identifies and identify prompted me to check the subject of each sentence. A single author identifies something, while Edwards and colleagues identify it. The circled wording could already be correct with et al.. That was a small example of how I used feedback throughout the draft. I checked the reason behind the comment and decided what to carry through. It also made me look at whether I was leading with the author’s name too often when the paragraph would be easier to follow if I started with the point.
I would look at the paragraph beside the sensory map and the passage on independence in the revised discussion. For each one I can ask whether a reader can explain the point in their own words after a first read. That is a useful check for the report because an examiner may be familiar with design research and still need the terms or examples to be introduced. Imi’s comments also helped me see the value of reading a draft aloud to notice where several ideas compete in one sentence.