Reading behaviour

Someone recently told me that, at my age, employers don’t want to read a resume ..they want to hear a good story. So, here’s number one. While I was back in graduate school, I did research modeling reading comprehension on the computer. We were trying to develop a 'natural language' interface based on adult reading skills. Our goal was to build a database system that could store information and answer questions in English-like fashion. My job was to test adults and see what cognitive skills they use to understand and remember what they read. We programmed these skills as ‘comprehension rules’ on the computer. I remember encountering a problem where we had to decide between two competing scientific theories of memory. We already knew that inference-making was an essential skill people use to understand what they read. One theory, called the depth-of-processing theory, held that competent readers make a wide range of 'elaborative' inferences in order to make reading material more memorable. The other theory, known then as the ‘relevancy hypothesis’, claimed that readers make only those inferences necessary to give the material coherence. I tested adult comprehension and memory for short reading passages that required inferences. The results supported the relevancy hypothesis meaning that readers made mostly the type of inferences that contribute to coherence. It also meant that we had to adapt a strategy to somehow constrain inference-making in our reading comprehension model. Research in this field not only benefits companies in the computer industry ..like Google ..it also advances the state-of-the-art in reading education ..contributing to programs that help children with learning disabilities like dyslexia. So, there you go ..I managed to write a job story ..as well as a public service announcement. How boring. I’m up to ten. What a long strange trip it’s been. If I promise not to post anymore of them ..will you please come back again ..?