DEMO: Revising bloated e-learning prose

Dec 07, 2012

Like you, I spend a lot of my time cleaning up the prose provided by SMEs. In this Storyline presentation, I give a few tips (and a bit of practice) on revising bloated e-learning prose. Hope you find it helpful.

Revising Bloated E-Learning Prose

30 Replies
Bruce Graham

Brilliant!

That was a GREAT course, beautifully crafted, and useful to anyone who writes eLearning.

I was going to say:

After having a look at your eLearning course and doing al the exercises, I would like to tell you that, in my opinion, that was a great, excellent and brilliant course, which was crafted in a really beautiful way. Anybody (ID, use, learner etc.) who creates eLearning, e-Learning, ELearning etc. would, I believe, find this course really quite useful....

...but maybe I won't now.

Bruce

Steve Flowers

Hey, Daniel - 

This is great! A couple of minor points of feedback:

1. I'd add in an indicator that signals when a slide ends if it's waiting for the participant to advance it.

2. On the slide where you're having the participant click the hyperlinks for feedback, I managed to get all of the audio to play at once There are a few ways to fix that one. One way is to open a layer and prevent clicking on the base layer until the audio finishes playing.

Good work, man. I grabbed my Fifth Edition Lanham off the shelf to flip through and extend the experience. It's a great reference. Others I like include:

Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale
How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish

Constance isn't very complementary of Strunk and White:) I like her style.

Daniel Brigham

Jeanette Brooks said:

Great job Daniel! I love how you share projects like this with the community. It's fun to see cool stuff built with Storyline, and it packs extra punch when it's such useful content. Nicely done!

Thanks, Jeanette: Your cherry tomato post was the inspiration. It took me awhile to figure it out, but it seems pretty easy once you do. Like most things, I guess.
Daniel Brigham

Kristin Savko said:

This was fun and informative. 

I wish I could have seen my answers I typed in laid next to the correct revision. I'm not sure if I did them right or not. 

thanks for sharing!

Kristin: You will be able to see your answers if you type in your revision and then hit the red "submit" button. Glad you found it of some use. --Daniel
Kristin Savko

Haha, yes! I think when I screen record is about the ONLY time my fingers slow down at the keyboard....or the mouse for that matter...I'm a bit of a crazy clicker.

And thanks! This photo is going on about 2 years old at this point, but I've never been able to give it up! He doesn't stay still enough for such a photo now (especially considering I took the photo with a timer).

Keith Williams

Hi Daniel,

What great timing.... I am working with one of our Technical SMEs at the moment, and I have forwarded the link to your DEMO. He has a lot of technical information (that needs simplifying) for inclusion in his PowerPoint presentation, and has almost finished all of the slides (including pictures and arrows etc).

He is about to get 'stuck into' creating the accompanying notes for each slide.

I have been explaining that it is important to simplify the notes for each slide, and to 'cut out' any unnecessary detail.

Your demo could not have been timed more perfectly..... and will be of great support.

Once he has completed all of the notes, he will narrate the presentation, then syncronise the slides with the notes in AP '09.

Finally I will take all of that and convert it to Storyline to produce the HTML5 and Flash versions (plus mobile version for iPad).

Thanks for sharing

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.