We write for lots of reasons. It’s all about communication, but with different purposes, there should be different writing. Just for books, the language in a thriller should be different than for thoughtful stories. Writing for ads is different than writing for science. And, writing for learning is different than writing for other purposes. What am I talking about?
What research tells us, as Ruth Clark lets us know, is that we learn better from conversational language. Formal language, such as in an encyclopedia, or a textbook, doesn’t work for elearning or how an instructor talks to an audience. You want to be informal, personal, and more. Yet too often our prose is tedious.
Dialog, in particular, should be authentic to the speaker. I quail when I see characters spouting language straight out of an instructional manual or, worse, a marketing spiel. Good character development goes beyond stereotypes and develops some personality. This should come through in their language. Writing dialog, then, isn’t what most designers have been trained in. Which means that designers shouldn’t write dialog, or at least get external support whether training, even just peer review.
Writing for learning needs to be clear, of course. It also needs to be accurate. And yet, it shouldn’t be onerous to read. If there are barriers to comprehension, you’re putting in unnecessary barriers to your learning outcome. Really, you’re managing cognitive load. Obtuse language impedes processing, and learning is processing-intensive enough!
I’ve talked before about the importance of emotion in learning, for motivation, keeping anxiety under control, building confidence, and more. Writing is one of the most compact forms of media for communicating, and so we want our language to address these issues as well. Conversational language helps reduce anxiety by being familiar, and shows relatedness, part of the Self-Determination Theory of motivation. When folks believe we care about them, they’re more inclined to succumb to our ministrations.
Writing for learning is one of the elements necessary for the appropriate use of media. We should use the right media for the message (with a caveat about the value of novelty), and then we should apply the right media correctly. That is, ensuring we apply the appropriate expertise. We can make changes, such as my common example of Ken Burn’s compelling use of still images in his video documentary of the Civil War, but even then there are accommodations. In short, writing for learning has some particular constraints, and we as designers should be aware of them.
There’s more, of course. What you write in an introduction is different than what’s presented about a model, than the narrative for an example, for the instructions versus the description of the context for retrieval practice, etc. Knowing what the role is, and the appropriate writing, becomes habit with experience, but like all learning, models and feedback help accelerate the path there. You need to know not just what to write, but how and when. Those are my thoughts, what are yours?
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