Pre-reading processing

When reading begins, the first task which must be accomplished is that of title identification. When a story is discovered, an expectation is generated that there will be a title, so this task explicitly gets immediately executed. If a title is discovered, it represents a tremendous opportunity for the reader. Stories are entitled the ways that they are to provide the reader with an idea of what to expect. Understanding the title, then, will help the reader generate the right set of   anticipations.

Consider again the example story, Lycanthrope. If the reader knows about lycanthropy, reading this title should generate an anticipation that the story will involve magical elements and shapeshifting humans. Based on the default sort of animal associated with lycanthropy, the reader will be anticipating a werewolf to be involved with the story. In the case of the example story, not all of these anticipations will be fulfilled, but they are an important aspect of the reading process. In a similar fashion, consider the short story, Men Are Different ([#!story:men!#]). This title should raise the question, men are different from what?. The reader will be anticipating that the story will provide an answer.

Closely associated with discovering the title is the identification of the author. As with the title, the discovery of an author is an expectation which is generated upon discovering that a story is being read. If successful identification can be achieved, the knowledge associated with a particular author can provide useful   anticipations for the remainder of the story. For example,   Isaac Asimov stories never involve time travel; if a reader is processing an Asimov story and believes that something can be solved through the use of time travel, this fact will cause that line of reasoning to be abandoned. Another example is Fredric Brown's stories; many of these contain a pun as the conclusion, which can be in the reader's mind as they work toward the end of the story.

Both title and author identification are expectations which are generated by the story structure comprehension supertask. The reader knows those two items of information are important and expects (in the vernacular sense of the word) to discover the title and author of a given text. As a result, normal reading is interrupted as the reader looks for this information. If the information is discovered, the specific action can be taken of utilizing it to make the reading process easier on the reader, through the predictions which are generated. If the material is not discovered, this also triggers an explicit processing step, as the reader must decide what action to take. A story without an explicit title might be read in order to produce one, for instance.