Supercharge Your Writing For Instructional Design

Regardless of how anyone falls into a career of designing learning experiences, nearly everyone is surprised by the amount of writing involved. When writing for instructional design, we must devise ways to inspire the audience even when the content is of little interest to them or when the content is dull and dry.

One way to find inspiration is to borrow writing techniques from other fields. You can find inspiration when you look at the methods of writers in Advertising, Journalism, Hollywood, and User Experience. The aim is to find a technique that works and then adapt it to meet your needs.

Strategies from Advertising

1. Know Your Audience

Although knowing your audience is common advice, stop and think about what it means. The advertising industry has more resources to research its audience than instructional designers. How can you do this on a low-budget project? Spend time with your audience. Converse with them, arrange meetings, or run a focus group (in-person or online). Do this, and it will show in your writing. You will learn their vocabulary, discover their challenges, and see what matters to them. This approach will give you new ways to connect with them. Check out Best Practices For Interviewing Your Audience for more on this.

2. Find the Right Voice

Effective advertising speaks to the audience in the appropriate voice. Voice encompasses the style, tone, attitude, and personality with which we write. When writing for instructional design, your voice may not matter. What is more important is using a voice that connects to the audience. It might be the voice of a teacher or a boss. It could be the voice of a colleague or peer. When you know your audience, you’ll find the right voice.

3. From Passive to Active

When was the last time you listened to a radio commercial? Radio commercials speak directly to their audience (or in dialogue, directly to the other person). Write with an active sentence construction to speak directly to your audience. With an active voice, the subject of the sentence performs an action. With  passive construction, the subject does not take a direct action, so the sentence feels weak. Grammar Girl uses this example from that old Motown song:

• Active: I heard it through the grapevine
• Passive: It was heard by me through the grapevine.

There are times when you can’t help but use a passive construction, such as when the subject of a sentence is vague. And although there is nothing grammatically incorrect about using passive voice, it is a less dynamic way of writing. When you want to speak to your audience with energy and power, work on that active construction.

Strategies from Journalism

4. Use Headlines, Not Titles

Magazines and newspapers use effective headlines. Many online news sites excel at writing headlines that make you want to click and read the article, even when you’re uninterested. What do these headlines have in common?

• You’re probably cooking your bacon all wrong (I clicked and I’m a vegetarian)
• New animal species is taking over Chernobyl
• Expert reveals key group that could save humanity

You probably noted that they are written to pique the readers curiosity. They are intriguing, possibly sensational and they don’t give it all away. Why not try this approach for course titles, topics, and lessons. Below are a few examples.

• Reimagine “Hand Sanitation in the Hospital” with “These Germs Aren’t Killed from Hand Sanitizer”
• Reimagine “Data Privacy and Protection Guidelines” with “What Hackers Hope You’ll Never Learn About Your Company’s Data”
• Reimagine “Customer Service Standards Training” with “The One Thing Customers Remember After the Call Ends”

5. Write Teasers in Menus and Topic Title Screens

Journalists use teasers on magazine covers and tables of contents to get us hooked. These small blurbs give you a peek at what’s inside to lure you in. Like headlines, teasers evoke curiosity. For example, in an eLearning course with scenarios, use teasers to get learners curious about the scenarios. Here are some examples for a course teaching restaurant servers how to treat customers:

• This server never studied the wine menu. Was it affecting the size of his tips?
• Amy didn’t like exchanging small talk with her customers. What did they think of her reticence?
• See what happened when Amir sat his customers at a dirty table.

Try adding teasers to menu items and see if learners find it more engaging.

Strategies from Hollywood

6. Give Your Protagonist an Obstacle

According to Lisa Cron, author of Wired for Story, the most effective Hollywood scripts provide the protagonist (the main character) with challenging obstacles. When you write scenarios and stories, ensure your protagonist has one or more barriers to overcome. Otherwise, the story will fall flat.

For example, rather than teach five rules for proper email etiquette, tell a story about the employee who lost a client due to his informal emails. Then, show how the employee redeemed himself and overcame his ineffective email skills to become an excellent communicator.

7. Make the Protagonist Change

In a podcast interview with Lisa Cron mentioned above, she noted that the key to storytelling is for the protagonist to change due to overcoming an obstacle. Watching a protagonist evolve through adversity will entice learners into your story. Try this approach when you write a longer scenario or story. It will be more likely to engage your audience.

Strategies from User Experience

8. Remove to Improve

User experience practitioners know the importance of microcopy—the small instructions that provide user interface feedback or help users understand what to do next. As learning designers, we often write eLearning microcopy for similar reasons. You can borrow a key writing strategy from UX design. Remove extraneous words from your microcopy to make it more concise. This means your word choices must be precise to express your meaning. See How to Write Your Best Microcopy.

9. Add Personality

Do you enjoy the witty user interface messages occasionally displayed in apps and websites? In my time tracking program, I get a friendly message if I accidentally forget to turn off a timer. The message reads, “Great Scott! You have a past timer running. Travel back in time to edit it or just click this link.”
It lets me know a person is at the other end of the app. Someone who has put in the extra time to make me smile.

You can write friendly messages and feedback in eLearning courses. For example, when a learner attempts to skip ahead before completing a mandatory exercise, your message can sound like it comes from a friendly person rather than a computer system.

For example, instead of “You must complete the exercise before continuing,” what about, “What’s the hurry? Please finish the exercise. You’ll be happy you did.”

Resource:

10 Types of Writing for Instructional Design