This chapter focuses mostly on how you need to think in order to first, compose the system, and second use the system to produce documents. Some of this way of thinking will be coded into electronic formats, while some of it is simply a way you need to think in order to produce text in this manner.
The first and foremost thinking change concerns the very activity of engaging in an activity that you have not thought of as a language activity in the past. Language activity has both a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic aspect; stringing things together one after another is syntagmatic, while collecting items to string together from a range of other items is paradigmatic. Selection from amongst a range of programs is a paradigmatic activity –does this program have the necessary meaning making actions than this program? Etc. Setting up instructions to get this program to work in the manner required producing this file to then be able to do that in the next program and then to get this to work in that manner in the next program is a syntagmatic activity. Certain instructions must go before other instructions and so on.
The other thinking changes come about while working within programs. While there are multiple different ways of doing the same thing within programs, there are just one or two ways of working within a particular program that is going to be satisfactory in this particular languaging activity. In MS Word, for example, you could have hundreds of different styles for paragraph and heading formats. To make text chunks as universal as possible, we must construct them in as simple a format as possible so that all text chunks have similar or the same formatting. Additional formats can be applied when a document is created and formatting of this nature can be applied for specific uses of the text chunk.
This chapter is about the way of thinking in terms of this particular system I am composing here. It is about how to manage inputs, storage objects, text, formats, styling and other possible modifications that can be made during the phase of adding further instructions to each program. This protocol activity is about the order in which instructions are given to a program and the range of the consistency of those instructions in getting results.