Making sense of the text
However, the writer has an advantage over the speaker: she has time to help the reader by making the text as straightforward as possible. The reader also has time at his disposal: he can stop and think, go back to check an earlier passage, reread the difficult parts. Unless the text takes for granted a body of knowledge that he simply does not have, a careful reader should be able to reconstruct most of the assumptions on which it is based. To do this he must assess the evidence – choice of words, selection offacts and so on – and draw appropriate inferences, so that he gets the message intended rather than the message he perhaps expected.
參考答案:读懂文章
然而，相对读者而言，作者有一大优势：她有足够的时间用以帮助读者尽可能直接的理解文章。读者也有时间：他可以停下来思考，回顾前面的章节，重新阅读难以理解的片断。一个认真的读者应当推想文章所建立在的全部基础知识点，除非他想当然认为了该基础知识点他完全不了解。为了推想，他必须评定证据——文字的选择，证据的选择等等——最后得出相应的推论。如此他才可以得到真正的信息，而不是他可能期望的信息。