Style counsel

E.learning Age, Sep 2005 by Shepherd, Clive, Kori, David

Why it's time to be word wise

According to Richard Saul Wurman, "Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand." More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. Sometimes it seems that most of this has landed on your desk.

Tempting as it may be to do away with the lot, we'd be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Documents do matter. We all need information to do our jobs and sometimes a formal, written document is the only suitable method we have available for conveying that information effectively. Think of all the reasons that written documents matter to us as e-learning professionals. We need them to articulate our goals and strategies, to make invitations to tender, to outline our proposals, to communicate the designs and scripts for our courses, to provide learning content for students, and to convey our ideas in articles and white papers.

Think how many hours in a week you spend creating, editing or reading formal, written documents (that's leaving aside all the less formal ones, such as emails, the websites that we visit and the publications that we subscribe to). How much easier would your life be if only writers used plain English instead of pompous business-speak and obscure jargon, if they structured their documents in fewer levels (no more sections labelled 1.3.22.4), if they formatted their pages so the muscles in your eye weren't worn out scanning across six-inch columns of text, if they took the trouble to remove the spelling and punctuation errors? If only.

To give an example of how difficult we make life for ourselves, hardly any of the authors of documents that I've had to edit in the past twenty years have taken advantage of the single most important feature of Microsoft Word, one that takes less than fifteen minutes to learn. I'm talking styles. People who refuse to learn about styles spend hours formatting every paragraph, heading, table and list individually. If they used styles they could easily collaborate with others on creating complex documents, they could change the complete look of a document in minutes, add automatic tables of contents in seconds, and effortlessly convert their documents to web pages and PDFs.

So, here's a feature of Word that's worth learning. Unfortunately, however long you spend teaching people to use the features of office software more efficiently, you won't help them to communicate more effectively. As readers may remember from The Emperor's New Slide Show (e.learning age, April 2004), concentrating on software features and not benefits only makes you a slave to the machine. It gives us death by PowerPoint. And to finish us off completely, by Word as well.

Practically everyone at work or in education today has the tools to be a communications professional - that's the software tools, not the skills needed to apply them. A little more emphasis on teaching the basics of good design would provide us all with documents worth reading; documents where the meaning is clarified and amplified using photos, illustrations, charts and diagrams; documents that employ more eye-catching and pleasing layouts, making use of box-outs, pull quotes and sidebars; and, bearing in mind how much of our reading is carried out on-screen, documents that employ embedded links to get us to and from the table of contents, main sections, appendices and references.

Cinderella won her prince using the power of the written word (see Box 1). Unfortunately, such results can not be guaranteed every time. But by practising the art of effective written communication, you will earn a lot of friends; people who actually look forward to reading what you have to say; people who might actually buy into your proposals, act on your recommendations and take heed of your advice.

WordWise, written by Clive Shepherd and David Kori, is available now from Above and Beyond, www.aboveandbeyond.ltd.uk