ABSTRACT
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had happened. Ernest Hemmingway, Old Newsman Writes, Esquire (1934)
Classification of concepts, objects or events is the hallmark of developed knowledge or scientific practice and to a very real extent, typologies can be seen as a measure of agreement (and by extension, progress) in a discipline. Fleishman and Quaintance (1984) point out that in psychology, a real problem in applied work is transferring findings from the laboratory to the field and that the lack of appropriate typologies (of tasks, acts, events and concepts) is a major stumbling block. As demonstrated in the literature review in Chapter 3, when it comes to studies of reading there is no standard reading text or task that can be used to investigate all important variables and thus, despite heavy reliance on proof-reading short sections of prose (and there exists wide variability even in this type of task) we are not in a very good position to generalize effectively from experimental to applied settings.
