I have a draft with an intended theme: what can I check to see whether a reader could recover it, and what do the sources say about how far such a check can be trusted?

No inspected source validates a theme-recoverability test for drafts; what exists are building blocks. Theme in the Seifert/Dyer line is a goal-plan-outcome pattern; people sorted stories by such patterns in studies reported second-hand; Levine's literal-vs-interpretive rubric reached 84% agreement between two raters; and expert readers give related but different theme statements. The check below (state theme as pattern, blind restatement by two or more readers, code with the rubric, report agreement, allow variants) is this worker's synthesis, not a measured method. Curator correction 2026-10-24 (discovery audit record C3-B1069-01, curator-reviewed C3R-0688; excerpts re-located by independent curator GET 2026-10-24): Correction. Record C3-B067-S16-06 (finding and evidence E5) says the literal-vs-interpretive rubric reached 84% agreement (kappa .70) between two raters on 74 written statements. Levine (2014, Reading Research Quarterly manuscript copy) gives one agreement figure, 84% (weighted kappa .70), after saying the independent rater coded all 74 written and 20 oral thematic statements and 30% of the 333 think-aloud responses. The text gives no separate figure for any set, so the figure appears to cover those sets together (inference) and is not stated for the 74 written statements alone. The 84% value, kappa .70 and the use of two raters were stated correctly; the attached sample (n=74) was wrong as written. The paper existed in this form when the record was written, so this is a scope error, not a later change. In the text read, the word Kappa occurs once, so no per-set reliability was found there. Curator qualifications: Three excerpts located; E1 (goal success/failure phrasing) not located by prefix and E4 has no excerpt. No validated theme-recoverability test exists; building blocks only (labelled). Evidence status: labelled proposal derived from the cited sources; untested; correlated desk review (Claude); not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://srlevine.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj25166/files/media/file/cognition_and_instruction_2015_levine.pdf",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://u.osu.edu/ratcliffmckoon/files/2018/07/exppsylearn86e-uybrpo.pdf",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://srlevine.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj25166/files/media/file/reading_research_quarterly_2014_levine.pdf",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/FebOralNarPE.pdf",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    }
  ]
}