Experimenting Reading and Hypertext

For Writing Media Text tutorial last week, we were handed a large piece of paper containing fragmented lines of a short story. Our task was to reassemble the lines back to its original piece or form one of our own. The purpose of this task was to analyze how we read and interpret text. We were told to note what influenced our decisions and how we piece together the fractured story. Was it our our own experience or prior knowledge; that helped us link the paragraphs to form the story? Or was it just plain common sense or logical thinking? What I've posted here above is the product of our team work and the most logical story we think the author was writing.

This exercise is similar to a game of jigsaw puzzle. The process of putting the story together involved several stages. Firstly, we scanned the overall text to get a gist of the story. Then, we started grouping the sentences together according to its context, place and time. For example, we lined the sentences that described the 'fat man' in a group, conversations between the main charatcer and her best friend Rita in one, and everything that had to do with food in another. Next, we chose two sentences to each begin and end the story. By doing that, we were able to form a loose structure of our plot, which also made it easier to fill in the gaps. By having a preconceived notion of what the story was about, we just lined the sentences as we go along according to the most logical sequence. For example, we knew that the order of serving the fat man his food was the bread and butter, salad, soup, main dish and dessert because that is what we do in real life. We were also aware of the time and venue stated in the sentences. In the end, we managed to construct a story based a lot on our prior understanding of how human nature works and plain common sense. We also presuned the kind of reactions that the characters made based on our own likened emotions