5 Tenets of Good Instructional Messaging

Sometimes We Just Have to Make It Work!

1. Keep it simple. Run your writing through a readability level test to see how it scores for your target audience. Write in the "voice of your audience," but be sure to remove jargon, clichés, marketing-speak or overly technical language (unless you're writing for engineers). If an average person from your target audience can't understand the language, then you need to iterate. Use this resource to score your writing: https://readability-score.com.
2. Value Your Learner's Time. By respecting your learner's time, you'll find yourself reconsidering a significant amount of what you're planning to design. With any training project in mind, constantly ask yourself, what business problem will this solve once I go to market with it? If the answer isn't plainly obvious, step back and think about it a bit more.
3. Be Hands-On. Embed yourself in the context of the environment you're building solutions for. Have you fully experienced the challenges, the situation, and the systemic constraints your learner faces? Have you gained enough empathy for them to feel comfortable your solution is valid? Have you investigated the true root causes of the identified gaps? Have you followed-up with all the parties involved (software vendors, business owners, management, IT teams, learners across the spectrum of low, average and high performers?)
4. Stay focused. Your mission is to serve your business and learners with practical, pragmatic solutions to help increase performance. Make sure you can tell the story of how your solution adds value, how it fits with the business imperatives, and how it's easy to use, efficient, and effective. Strive to become an expert in the business you support, know the key messages and never waver from them, don't dilute the instructional message with non-relevant, non-performance based content, always know the direct benefit the learner receives by consuming the message.
5. Respect the Brand. Unified messaging aligned to the corporate brand helps coalesce the messages for the learner.