While I was researching and preparing for the presentation call "How to Write So People Will Learn," I was thrilled to find Marcia Conner and the resources on her Ageless Learner website.
Most people love taking self-assessments, and I'm no different. I tested and wrote about my own learning style in this previous post, How Do You Like to Learn?
Thanks to Marcia, we've got four new juicy assessments to help us learn about and improve our own learning process.
Here are the four assessments, along with my suggestions for how to gear your writing to people with different learning styles.
(1) What's Your Direction Style?
To make sure your content appeals to both global and linear learners, balance your blog with both thought pieces and "how to" pieces.
(2) What's Your Engagement Style?
Think-to-talk learners will probably appreciate the opportunity to interact with your new ideas by studying them alone. For talk-to-think learners, you may want to offer additional opportunities for them to discuss the ideas with you one-on-one or in a group.
(3) What's Your Motivation Style?
For readers who are goal-oriented, remind them of the results they may see if they apply what you're suggesting. For people who are relationship-oriented, give them the opportunity to share their learning with others. Or remind them of how your solutions will improve their business or personal relationships.
For readers who are learning-oriented, offer plenty of links for them to continue reading and learning.
(4) What's Your Learning Style?
For visual learners, consider incorporating graphs, images or video into your blog posts. For audio learners, try recording your post with Audio Acrobat. For tactile/kinesthetic learners, close your article with active ways they can implement what they've learned.
While you won't apply each of these strategies to every blog post, there are plenty of ideas here to help you stretch your writing to appeal to a wider range of learners.
These four assessments were published in Marcia's 2004 book, Learn More Now: 10 Simple Steps to Learning Better, Smarter, and Faster. Marcia has continued to write and teach about the topic of learning, including a blog on the Fast Company website and a new book, The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media (with Tony Bingham, forward by Daniel H. Pink).
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