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Hi all, Apologies to those that caught this on the e-learning list, and who probably popped along for our meeting at the museum, but I feel it is worth repeating. As the educationalist for the NoF PortCities project, I spend my entire time working with authors to help them create readable and understandable text and feel it is this element which is often ignored (I have expanded on this in an article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement this friday). With an average reading age of twelve in the UK population, I am fairly confident that many people will have no idea what "facilitate collaborative working by researchers on our two digitisation projects" (extract from www.historyshelf.org) actually means. If you mean the project is taking pictures of paintings, drawings and pots from museums in East Lothian, putting them on a website and involves people from all over the area then say so. Many of the sites on www.enrichuk.net that are **launched** have issues with their level of english used. The museum sector, in common with academia, has fantastic content but sometimes produces material that believe polysyllables equate to intelligence whereas often high syllable words and complex language tend to hide meaning. Through my work, our partners are now creating engaging and accessible content which is a credit to all involved. Just my two penceworth, Richard Consortium Educationalist Port Cities - National Maritime Museum [log in to unmask] ******* Extract from e -learning list **************** To sum up my methods in a short email is a tough task so here is a summary of useful pointers (I hope to expand on this at a future e-learning group meeting if possible on writing for the web). Accessible language ------------------- Hard to define but essentially this means writing for the average reading age of the UK which is 12. To do this, try and replace or remove high syllable words. Place any specialist terms or jargon in a glossary. Check the reading age with various online tests (e.g. http://www.timetabler.com/reading.html#4 on the Fry readability graph) or using the grammar checker in Word. Keep sentence structure short. Front loaded paragraphs ----------------------- Make sure the first paragraph of the material acts as an abstract and tells the whole story of the piece in brief. Make this as accessible as possible as this will be scanned by most people to see if they want to read the remaining text. Clear sections and sub-headings ------------------------------- Divide the material up into clear sections that flow chronologically or through the theme. Make sure sub-headings are detailed, almost in sentence form and explain what the paragraphs below will cover as people will use these to jump around the content. Conclude the material with a paragraph to evaluate or analyse the material you have written. Provide external and internal links ----------------------------------- Make sure people can go further so while they are reading your material, they could jump off and explore another site then return to your material. Also ensure that people can easily jump around the story by using the sub- headings to build the navigation. Links to other material on your site are great to provide as they will then retain visitors. Create a style guide --------------------- A style guide is a useful tool to add to as you progress to record how you want the text to be written. For example, are you going to write nineteenth century or 19th century ? Put in a word list of common phrases that could be spelt incorrectly or misunderstood by authors. Check out The Economist's guide (http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/index.cfm) and their quiz or the Guardian's guide (http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/0,5817,,00.html) for examples of what I mean. If anyone would like to hear more about the PortCities project or writing for the web more specifically, I will be organising a group meeting to share my experiences and hopefully learn more from all the members on the list. As soon as I have a date, I will post another message to the list. Yours, Richard Freeman -------------------------------------- |Consortium Educationalist | |Port Cities - National Maritime Museum| |E - [log in to unmask] | |T - 0208 312 6504 | |F - 0870 132 0240 | --------------------------------------------------------------------- |This email is personal. It is not authorized by the National Maritime | |Museum or the Royal Observatory Greenwich. All contents of the e-mail | |is the personal responsibility of the sender. | ---------------------------------------------------------------------