Newvsold

New information and old information

In a large proportion of English sentences the arrangement of new and old information is arranged in a particular way. The reader is generally introduced to what he/she already knows before new information is provided.

Blumer's (1969) second principle of symbolic interaction is that social interaction is the source from which meanings are derived . Thus, the meanings that a person has for the things in his or her world are created by the actions of other people. (Chalmers 1998:87)
The central research question was pursued through a set of guiding questions based on Blumer's (1969) first principle. Guiding questions are not specific questions to be answered. (Chalmers 1998:90)

The outcome of the diversity that existed amongst the teachers facilitated the development of a 'dense' theory about the phonomenon of 'inclusion'. The importance of 'density' in a substantive grounded theory is highlighted by Glaser (1978). (Chalmers 1998:100)

You can see that information which is in the first sentence, is presented first in the second sentence and this is then followed by the new information. This is a very common pattern and is one that enhances readability, that is, it makes what you are writing very easy to understand because it follows the patterns which readers of English are used to. It is important to note that this information pattern is just one of a number available to writers and will not be used in every single sentence. In fact, the text would be very boring if the old/new pattern were repeated all the way through it. One instance, when we do deliberately invert the old/new pattern is when we change topic.

Another important value of old/new patterning has been pointed out by Witte & Sodowski (1983). They have noted that, with a population of readers grading essays, there were more sentences in the low-graded essays with no old information. They claim that the readers

‘took longer to establish the semantic context necessary to make the high load of new information in such sentences understandable' (vande Kopple 1986:94).This suggests that we rely on this patterning of old and new to allow us to process the high loads of new information in academic writing.

There has been considerable discussion in this literature about the degrees of ‘oldness’ or ‘givenness’, for example is ‘old/given’ information that we all already know (a sort of assumed world knowledge), or is it something that an expect in the field would know, or is it something that has already been mentioned in the discourse. It is all these things so we might say that we have degrees of ‘givenness’.

This leads to a generalization of how we understand text structure:

at the level of the sentence, a sense of structure begins with the appropriate arrangements of information that is old and new, assumed and surprising, presupposed and unexpected. a sense of text structure also depends on what a reader already knows about the subject matter.
A reader thoroughly familiar with a topic will be considerably more forgiving in constructing for him/herself the experience we call coherence.
A reader who is entirely knowledgeable about a subject needs fewer text signals out of which to construct a sense of form.
A reader who is not knowledgeable about a subject needs many. (Colomb & Williams 1985:94)