Claude Shannon's Model

Claude Shannon was an engineer for Bell Telephone Laboratories after World War II. His
mathematical theorems are a major basis of information theory as practiced by engineers.
Shannon's concept of a communication system is formulated in a commonly found diagram. The
diagram shows that information is transmitted from an information source through a channel to a
receiver.

Shannon's diagram emphasizes the encoding of information to be transmitted and the decoding
of received information. It also indicates the effect of noise on the channel through which the
information is transmitted.

The value of Shannon's model for the theory of writing is its emphasis on encoding/decoding and
on the effect of noise. Shannon's model is limited for the theory of writing in that it overlooks the
motives of both the sender (writer) and receiver (reader). People have reasons for writing and
reading; Shannon's model does not take the reasons into account.

Roman Jakobson's Model

Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist. His model of the communication process represents
spoken rather than written communication, and there are some who argue that it doesn't apply to
writing. Nevertheless, it is often applied to writing.

Jakobson's model is often represented in a diagram. The elements of the diagram (changed to
apply to writing) are: the writer, the reader, the context, the message, the contact, and the code.
By naming the writer and reader as parts of his model, Jakobson does make an opening for
motives and other "subjective" factors.

The contact (like Shannon's channel) is the medium through which the message is transmitted. In
the case of this web page, for instance, the contact is complex: It includes the server which
houses the file which you're reading, the computer and software with which you're reading it, and
the means by which they are connected. This same information could be transmitted through a
different channel, a printed book, a chalk board, or a speech.

The code is the language which, presumably, writer and reader share. (Translated writing
complicates this aspect of the model). The code includes the type of writing as well as other
conventions of written language.

Jakobson's model helps to chart the purposes of a piece of writing, according to which part of the
model a purpose relates to. Jakobson's model incorporates some features of Shannon's (the
transmission of information via a channel). Jakobson's model is limited in that it doesn't
represent the discovery processes that writers engage in nor does it indicate the recursiveness of
both writing and reading.
Often, a simplified version of Jakobson's model is used, diagramed as a triangle with writer,
reader, and text at the angles. James L. Kinneavy wrote A Theory of Discourse structured on this
model. However, by omitting part of Jakobson's model, Kinneavy's diagram loses some of
strength of Jakobson's model, while retaining its weaknesses.