I’ve just arrived back from a really interesting workshop on voice coaching which brought up a few new considerations for me when creating elearning materials.

One of the most important aspects of the voice coaching workshop centred around warming up your voice in order to attain the full vocal range. Picture a room full of seemingly insane people - heads lolling about in circles, mouths making buzzing and, bluntly, farting noises. No, you haven’t walked into an lunatic asylum - this is the kind of thing you have to get used to doing if you want to use your voice to it’s full effect. The end purpose of this is to push your voice out of the sometimes monotone quality it can have if you launch into a speech unprepared. The warm-up will make your voice more ‘flexible’ and lead to a more easy and varied tone, which is known to increase engagement in listeners.

Now, I thought, that makes sense, and is certainly something I can use for workshops in my day-to-day work. But what about the other type of lecturing I do, ie. ’speaking’ to learners online? Is it possible to introduce a varied tone in your writing, and if so, how? What takes a particularly monotonous, ‘monotone’ piece of text and makes it interesting, engaging and varied in tone?

Tutors and trainers, whether in education or business, are often thrown into teaching with the expectation that they will succeed simply due to their expert status. The old problem was that of lecturers, experts in their area, simply not being able to engage their students due to their lack of presentation and public speaking skills. The new problem is that trainers and tutors now have to write thousands of words of training materials while not necessarily having any great writing skills.

Naturally, those that land a job in this area will be hugely knowledgeable in their field, and will no doubt have an excellent standard of written english. But as I discovered in the voice coaching workshop earlier today, there’s a big difference between being able to speak correctly and being able to speak in an interesting and engaging manner.

Writing well is a highly skilled process - car manufacturers wouldn’t dream of trying to write advertising copy themselves for examples, they will have professional writers and marketers for such a task. The same is becoming true of the video games industry, going through somewhat of an upheaval at the moment, as they realise that they simply can’t write plots and stories themselves any more. To compete with films and TV they need professional writers delivering professional writing.

Thousands and thousands of pages of training materials are being produced day-in day-out, but are they effective? The content may be good, but will it engage the learner and actually make a difference? Perhaps we need to do more work on training staff in writing techniques, or having systems to alter works to make it more engaging. Imagine a team of proffessional writers taking in raw learning content from academics and producing an endless supply of stimulating, engagement learning resources. There’s no question that the current university model would struggle to support this financially, but given doubly engaged students and reduced drop-out and fail rates would it be worth it.

Of course this is all conjecture, it may not have that much of an effect, but let’s think about the number of academic books out there at the moment. Lecturers and students will recommend texts based on how accessible and stimulating they found them. Therefore, discounting the most obscure of subjects, noone has to suffer through a dull, dull account or their area when a better written alternative is available. Course notes, however, have no such alternative, and students will struggle through with no help in sight.

I still remember many painful hours as an undergraduate reading through papers and books written by experts in the field with no idea how to spice up a subject bar a quick sprinkling of some exotic and obscure language. Is it time to acknowledge that being an academic doesn’t automatically infer a talent for writing? I would say yes… but then I might tomorrow be handed a copy of, ‘Maximum Likelihood Cointegration Rank Test Statistics,’ and asked, “Spice this up a little bit would you?”

In the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of academic writing online, not only for the SBOSE course but for a number of workshops at Napier that run both online and face-to-face. The experience has got me thinking more about the writing style I use when doing this.

One of the other things that got me pondering was the fact that I like writing anyway, outside of work. Whether I’m good at it or not I’m not sure, but I enjoy it anyway and I keep a Blog on my favourite timewaster, Mountain Biking, in my spare time. In the past few weeks I’ve been noticing the mental shift required when swapping between writing my academic material and my personal content, and I’m beginning to wonder if that’s a good thing.

I’ve been through a fair bit of education in my life and had plenty of experience of wading through the often over-the-top, why use 1 word when 5 will do academic approach to writing. I like to think I’m an intelligent and literate person (most of the time anyway…) but I often get frustrated trying to decipher the weighty prose in many academic papers. Despite this, however, I sometimes find myself joining their ranks and including words and phrases in my academic work simply because they sound impressive or convey intelligence, rather than convey clear meaning. I think it’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly when you’re relatively new to the environment like myself and trying to match yourself against esteemed and proven colleagues.

Now, compare this with my personal writing, in which I try to be informal, unpretentious and hopefully as accessible as possible. I know the kind of guys I go biking with and the variety of folk I meet on the trail. I want all of them to read my articles and enjoy them regardless of background and ability. Somehow, this is starting to sounds familiar… I’ve begun to ask myself why this is any different from writing academic pieces, when we should always be thinking about making content as accessible as possible in order not to hamper learning. This can just as easily be applied to writing for your colleagues as you can never assume that others have the same vocabulary as yourself no matter how well qualified they are.

In the student-led seminar that myself and Martin have been running we’ve been discussing the widening access issue, in which the government has set a target to increase access to education for those from the working classes and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Entrance requirements are being lowered to allow more people the chance to study, and some argue that this leads to a dumbing-down of education. I would argue, though, that some elements of dumbing-down may be a good thing. Making education more accessible by simply writing in a more approachable manner would surely help all students, not just those who haven’t acheived such a high literacy level. Taking myself as an example, I waste hours reading academicised (my new word…) papers and articles multiple times in order to decipher the premise, and once I have the idea I can often see how easy it would have been to convey said premise in a much more simple manner. Those hours could be far more productively spent elsewhere. Supporting the student surely involves making their learning as easy and accessible as possible while maintaining your standards, and so not forcing a time wasting translation process has to be a step forward.

Going back to my original point, from now on I’m going to try to approach my academic writing from the same point of view as the personal. I’ll always write for the broadest possible audience. Obviously, this is easier in some subjects than others and some concepts always require more obscure, inaccessible language, but in general terms it’s very achievable.

I wonder, for my final point, if readers have noticed that I’m already attempting to escape from one of the more restrictive rules. Can you imagine handing in a dissertation with contractions in it for example? Why not though? They’re easier and faster to read, and fully accepted as part of the english language, so why are they not allowed in academic writing? Moreno and Mayer did some research in this area and based on their results they proposed the Personalisation Principle (Moreno & Mayer, 2000). In their research they discovered that students learned more effectively when content was presented in an informal, personalised manner rather than in a formal, distant format.

So, not only does it seem like a good idea for inclusivity but more informal writing is backed up by solid research. Come on my fellow academic writers - shake off your thesauruses (thesauresi…?), bring out the apostrophes and write for people rather than for academia. I’ll never have to read a paragraph twice again.