Texts as models: early thoughts

If we negate the classical view of rhetoric and composition (communication across curriculum discipline) principle that the key objective of an essay is to prove an author’s point, then we might conclude that an essay is a model.

If we do that, we can rethink concepts of text engineering. The model consists of structure and logic, data, and reasoning, or calculation results. For example, an Excel spreadsheet has a structure (rows and columns), logic (formulas and links), data (the content of cells), and calculation results.

In context, each model has a situation of application, verification methods (how do we check that the model is correct and applicable to the situation), model quality assessment criteria (SEQUAL, assessment checklists, and so on), and embodied trust of agents to this model (Devlin, 2003, 2005 and idea of the scientific community as Bayesian inference agent network).

The thesis, in this case, becomes a model reasoning result.

The structure of the text becomes model structure and its’ inference logic (Pearl, 2019).

Introduction becomes a description of the current model.

The discussion becomes a plan for model reconsideration, refinement and should show how we can improve it (PDCA cycle, knowledge advancement).