Contents
Background
Our interest in this topic goes back to our early work with David Grove where he taught us to “parse” and “muse” on sentences. The verb ‘to parse’ is defined as “to analyse (a sentence) into its parts and describe their syntactic roles”.

David would have a client write a sentence on a flip chart and the training group under his guidance would aim, as he put it, to discern the "intelligence between the lines" i.e. to make explicit what is implicit in the logic of the client's words (and later, the way they had written those words, which he called Hieroglyphics). As we saw it, his parsing and musing was a way of deconstructing the sentence and constructing a model of the organization of the client's model of the world.

We described how we parsed, mused on and constructed a model of single sentences in our articles 'The Emergence of Background Knowledge' (1998) and ‘A Model of Musing: The Message in a Metaphor’ (2002). From single sentences we worked our way up to complete client-therapist transcripts.

Since then we have extended the modelling process to advise on company change announcements (Did the announcement send the intended message to the employees?); an Food and Drug Administration meeting (Was the Chair equitable and careful his questions were answered?); an analysis of clinical drug-trial directors (How could best-practice be assessed?); a questionnaire for the Yale University Child Development Study; and academic research on work-life balance to name but a few.

Purpose
Our aim in this paper is to document the value of modelling the written word with a clean and metaphor perspective. To do this we:

• Summerise the kinds of texts that we have modelled
• Provide examples of how we modelled these texts
• Some general guidelines for others to use.

Kinds of written word we have modelled

It is important to note that the written word can be modelled for either the organisation of content, or the process of author producing the content, or both. In a recent academic research project James modelled the transcripts of interviewees for:


Below is a summary of some of the types of texts we have modelled. In particular we highlight examples which give insights into the process of our modelling.

Single Statement/questions

The articles mentioned above show how we modelled the following  client statements:


Questionnaires


Letter to staff


Transcripts of 1:1 therapy/coaching

We have modelled and annotated over a hundred transcripts of client sessions – often as part of therapist and coach supervision.

Examples of our modelling of our own client sessions can be seen at:



Exemplar Modelling

First-person accounts


Academic Research

• To explore how Clean Language could generate insights into the experience of individual participants, and into understandings of the nature of work-life balance generally, through its capacity for eliciting participant-generated (autogenic) metaphors.
• To test the application of Clean Language as a research methodology.

Meetings


Process/Technique


Modelling Shared Reality


FURTHER READING

For a number of articles on modelling, including


See:    www.cleanlanguage.co.uk/articles/categories/Modelling/