ABSTRACT
Consider the following piece of writing, displayed recently for a few hours on hoardings in the streets of Edinburgh:
This very transient and very simple text, referring to a judge deemed to be handing down lenient sentences, works with a number of ‘deep’ suppositions. It supposes a reader walking or driving in the street whose attention needs to be caught by large and bold lettering, and who knows that these words are on display because they are tied to a story in the newspaper whose name is inscribed on the border of the poster. It assumes that the reader believes the story it tells is factually true, and that it is newsworthy, not trivial (this is one reason why the word ‘storm’ here cannot be read literally: judges caught in the rain are not news). And it supposes that the reader possesses the information necessary to understand what this ‘case’ was, and hence what the old ‘storm’ was in which this judge was involved. (The reader must also know enough about legal process to know what a judge and a case are.)
Most of the knowledge required to read and understand this text is knowledge about the kind of writing it is: knowledge about its genre. Some of the knowledge required of the reader looks like knowledge about the real world rather than knowledge about texts and genres; but the ‘rape case’ with which the reader is deemed to be familiar is defined by the fact that it was extensively written about in previous issues of the newspaper; the ‘storms’, both old and new, are storms in a newspaper, and the knowledge the reader is expected to have is intertextual: knowledge of earlier reports and earlier controversies.
