Chapter 34 Reflections
A Handbook on Educational Communications and Technology
Designing Instructional and Informational Text
I chose to read the chapter about designing instructional and informational text because as somebody who spends their day’s developing e-learning I feel it is definitely something that can improve the effectiveness of my work. I see a lot of research about how to best use images but not a lot about text so I thought this would be a good topic to learn more about. I also feel it is becoming more and more important to make text as clear and concise as possible as people are scanning more and reading less. These day’s if you are going to get your point across with text it better be clear and attention grabbing or it’s going to get scanned over.
A lot of what they described as being effective in text are the basics that we learned in elementary school but learning more about the research behind what makes those things effective was helpful. The basics of structuring sentences and paragraphs has become second nature but I have to admit that after all these years I have become a little lazy and this article was a good reminder of what I learned many years ago. Although much of it seemed like common sense, it can be easy to get lost in your own writing and overlook the basics of structuring sentences and paragraphs so that they are easy to read and understand.
Something I found interesting was the notion that maybe today’s text books are too easy to read and not challenging enough to keep students engaged. We always do all we can to make text as easy to read as possible but when it comes to a complex topic maybe simple is not best. Perhaps making the student work harder to understand keeps them engaged and challenged. It’s definitely something that needs a lot more research but an idea that I found interesting.
Overall, I thought it was a helpful article although much of it seemed like common sense or basic English. What the author discussed as being effective is basic but if you think about examples of text that was not clear or concise, it is usually because they broke the rules of common sense or basic English.
Hartley, J. (2004). Virtual realities. In D. Jonassen, (Ed.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (2nd ed., pp. 461-497). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers
