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This chapter casts back over the entire period under discussion — from the mid-17th century to the 1820s — and sees it as a momentous phase in the history of reading. William Hazlitt's pivotal essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’ is used to frame an investigation of the symbolic relation between spoken discourse and the written discourse in the performance and reception of literary texts. Hazlitt's hint that such differences were already apparent in 1798 is amplified two pages later in ‘My First Acquaintance’ when he describes how William Wordsworth ‘sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation’. The essay is deeply affectionate and elegiac, but not an uncritical one. It discloses the depth of Hazlitt's anger with respect to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's apostasy and his regret that the political impetus behind Lyrical Ballads could not be sustained.

In writing a successful text, writers of professional discourses have to be able to describe, inform, convince, or instruct so that their communicative purposes can be fulfilled. During this ongoing shift toward a knowledge-based era, concern for communities has been on the increase as people have made efforts to become more aware of public administration and opinion expression. As the demand increases for independent investigation for various significant events, this phenomenon becomes more common particularly in Hong Kong. In addressing issues attributed with social impacts, written discourses or investigation reports have played no small part during the recent years since these offer facts, lessons, and recommendations. This chapter attempts to identify and address the various issues related to constructing successful texts and investigation reports.

This chapter evaluates the act of writing text. It considers how gamers create culture before, during, and after gameplay via engagement with wider written discourses. Media literacy needs to be refocused towards an 'ongoing engagement with contemporary culture' and gaming is an expression of popular culture that would benefit from pedagogic engagement. It has now become impossible to ignore the impact of gaming on everyday culture, wherein time spent on gaming can outweigh time spent in formal education or employment for some. However, since many people use games to escape from real-life, how can it be that gaming might actually enhance real-life? The chapter suggests that writing has moved beyond traditional boundaries in terms of what is written, where one writes, and how one writes. Much of the experience of gaming is expressed within discourses that exist outside of the actual gameplay itself which, harnessed appropriately, can have important educational value.

This chapter formulates general conclusions stemming from the three parts of the book. It draws attention to the combination of interdisciplinary approaches which have illuminated the forms and functions of repetitive elements in early legal and administrative texts. The discussion proceeds now from the empirical findings to the theoretical underpinnings. The staggering amount of recurrent fixed strings of text has offered ample material to interpret. The exposition of technical decisions in this project has been very transparent, so that the reader could find solutions to many problems posed by adapting modern corpus methods to historical data. The chapter summarizes structural and functional findings, and recognizes the role of long lexical bundles in indicating the areas of textual standardization. The instrumental role of extralinguistic conditions for the linguistic characteristics of early legal texts is stressed, and the unique Scottish perspective of the project is endorsed.