3

The Writing Competency

“When instructional writing is done well, it has the power to reduce cognitive load, increase memory retention, and increase content engagement. It’s a catalyst for learning, not a blocker.”

– Andrew Debell, author and instructional designer

Strong writing skills are important in instructional design. I spend at least 50% of my time on each ID project outlining, structuring, and revising my writing – and that doesn’t include time spent on client-requested revisions. In fact, some sources cite that writing comprises 80% of the average time spent on an instructional design project (https://tinyurl.com/yunbrthk). That’s huge!

Figure 3.1 – The Four Competencies Model

In this chapter, we’ll review:

• What writing for ID means and how to do it
• A case study that highlights some common writing-for-ID pitfalls
• Some practical tips and additional resources you can reference to build your writing competency

Writing may or may not come easily to you. You may love it or loathe it. But here’s the newsflash: You must be at least a competent writer to excel in ID. Even if you’re an ace at Articulate Storyline development, if the underlying structure of your online course is poorly structured, rife with grammatical errors, or doesn’t engage the learner, your courses will be ineffective.

As an instructional designer, it’s the learning experiences you develop that organizations rely on to change behavior, so writing clearly and persuasively is important.

I’ve worked for, with, and even hired fellow instructional designers who can and cannot write well. On each project, writing mattered. In fact, projects were often slowed due to poor content structuring/writing skills or the inability to capture the client’s voice.

Glossary

Voice in writing for instructional design is often dictated by a company’s writing/brand style guide. It refers to how punctuation, syntax, point of view (person), tone, and choice of words are used.

In my opinion, your writing competency is even more important than being a strong course developer. As an ID professional, you can always outsource an ID developer, but it’s much more difficult to outsource an effective course writer that understands all the nuances of an organization’s writing style and their needs for the course you’re designing.

What is writing for ID?

One of the challenges (and joys!) of being an instructional designer is that you get to learn about a variety of professions and subjects all the time. I’ve written and designed courses for everything from patent law in candy-making to digital marketing 101, to how to take care of yourself.

Given the wide range of topics your work may lead you to, you may be asked to write in a variety of styles. Often, how you approach your writing style is dependent upon the company/client and subject matter, but there are some common threads that run throughout all ID projects.

The most important takeaway here is that writing for instructional design needs to motivate the learner. In addition to conveying the content through designed interactions in whichever course authoring software tool you’re using, your learner needs to learn.

As instructional designers, we’re hired to change people’s behaviors, so our work needs to be engaging and clear enough to deliver these behavior-changing concepts. Inevitably, how we write the course is the backbone for this.

As instructional designers, we need to be able to do the following:

• Structure and organize course content clearly - eliminate random, unassociated bits of content
• Be concise - avoid redundant wording and sentence structure
• Watch for common grammatical and punctuation errors - always scan for typos
• Be engaging and motivating - through writing in a conversational tone

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.

Structuring your course content clearly

Disorganized content confuses learners. While this might seem like a completely basic concept, as an ID, it’s easy to get excited about your project and dive right into its design phase before properly structuring your content.

In the preceding chapter, we discussed the importance of conducting a needs assessment and target audience analysis, or answering the questions of Why?, Who?, and What’s the end goal? Now, we need to tie back to those learning objectives (LOs) we wrote and properly structure our content.

Knowing your higher and lower-order concerns

Higher-order and lower-order concerns are English professor-type terms that refer to structuring the big picture (higher-order) and related content (lower-order) of your course content. Before diving into an authoring tool to design and develop, I like to sit down and create a content map that outlines the higher-order structure of the course using the LOs I’ve developed.

I tend to do this even if the client has not asked for a formal outline or design document, as I like to organize my thoughts visually. For me, this involves a simple Google doc drawing that highlights what I see as the overall structure of the course. Unless I’m designing a microlearning, I usually tie each lesson to a learning objective, then create topics and sub-topics from there.

Glossary

Microlearning refers to chunking an eLearning course into several bite-size learning elements, often delivered via mobile-capable technology. The idea is that shorter micro-courses will prevent the learner from zoning out or disengaging from the course content and provide 'quick hits' of key information to the learner. Often, a microlearning course may relate to just one learning objective.

Contrary to popular belief, it’s not necessary to get too granular or complete a complicated flowchart to get your course’s basic structure down – plus, your stakeholders will appreciate the simplicity of your map.

Here’s an example of a content map for a 30-minute Articulate RiseTM course I developed:

Figure 3.2 – Higher-order course content map for the “Managing Yourself” course

From there, depending on the length of the course, I’ll create a design document following the content map that’s split into called-out sections for each lesson. Here, I will outline the initial draft content first, take a bit of a break, then return to the design document to add my ideas surrounding visuals, job aids, learner activities, and interactions.

In the end, I will make sure to write the initial draft content as close as it will appear on screen in the online course for my stakeholders to review.

Glossary

A design document is the blueprint for a course. It shows the overall course structure and detailed information for each course module or lesson.

The following example is a design document for the same course, using the course authoring software tool Articulate Rise 360TM. Here, we see the progression of higher- to lower-order concerns: an introduction to a new topic (Procrastination) within the Time Management lesson is called out in the content map.

Here’s the design document for the same 30-minute Articulate RiseTM course:

Figure 3.3 – Design document for the “Managing Yourself” course

We progressively get more detailed in addressing lower-order concerns in the Tab interaction, highlighting the benefits of not procrastinating. Additionally, we see that the types of interactions are called out in the left-hand column, while the design notes are called out in pink. The right-hand column is reserved for any additional explanations that the ID thinks they might need to add.

Depending on where you work, who’s developing your course (you or another team), and/or the chosen software development tool, you might need to also provide a more detailed storyboard for your stakeholders before you go into development. We’ll talk more about design documents and the storyboarding process in Chapter 4, Creativity in Instructional Design.

Glossary

A storyboard is like an even more detailed design document. It includes the text, visuals, and specific programming notes for an eLearning course. People choose to storyboard in different ways, some using Powerpoint, others using online tools like Miro or...