The Learning Success Blog

Leonie Swift is a self-described ‘word nerd”. She’s a former librarian with a passion for Plain English. Leonie now teaches people how to write in Plain English so their readers get the message easily and understand clearly what’s been written.

She says Plain English is not only useful for writing documents, school assignments, articles, reports and so on. It’s applicable everywhere, even for writing on street signs.

I recently chatted with Leonie on the Learning Capacity Podcast where she explained why Plain English is not just “dumbing down” writing but is so important if you want to get your message understood. 

And she gives some examples of how it can also be fun.

How do you communicate complex information in a way that people unfamiliar with the subject's jargon can understand it? 

How do teams of experts from different disciplines communicate with each other? 

Dr Judy Ford, retired genetics expert and now a communications specialist, spoke to The Learning Capacity Podcast about ways to overcome these challenges.

She has been working with PhD students to help them navigate through their PhDs, and this includes how to communicate in writing and especially speaking.  

In the Podcast she talks about the Three Minute Thesis Competition in which students have only three minutes to communicate the ideas that are important in their PhDs.

Children who are co-operative, socially responsible and helpful in kindergarten achieve higher scores on reading, writing and numeracy tests in primary school, compared with children with less pro-social behaviour.

This is the finding from a 5-year study of more than 52,000 kindergarten students from nearly 2800 schools.  The study was led by Dr Rebecca Collie at the University of New South Wales School of Education. 

Test scores from the children’s NAPLAN (Australia’s National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy) in 2012 and 2014 were compared for four different social and emotional behavioural profiles observed when they were in kindergarten:

25 university students who had Fast ForWord123 training for 11 weeks boosted their writing skills 25%.

This compares with a control group of 28 students at the same university who did not receive the training, and who showed no improvement over the same 11 week period.

Because no explicit practice with writing is included in the training program, the results of this study demonstrate that training in basic cognitive, listening, and reading skills generalise to improved writing ability.

The writing skills of the Fast ForWord 123 group were measured before and after training. The measurement tool was the OWLS Written Expression Scale. This is an internationally recognised standardised assessment which showed the 25 students improved their writing skills from below the control group students to above them after the training.

Never start a sentence with 'and'.    

Really?

Imagine if you could easily improve your writing, or your students' writing, by ignoring some old rules such as the one above. And by using some writing principles from neuroscience.

A new book, The Reader’s Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer  contains 6 science - based guidelines you can use. It also includes some old rules that don't help at all.

The author is a university professor who wanted to give her students a way to improve their writing with insights from neuroscience data, such as eye-tracking, EEG brain scans, and fMRI neuroimaging.

Children today are doing much less handwriting than children did 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Before computers became commonplace, handwriting was much more important for everyone. Back then schools put considerable time and attention on making sure students developed their handwriting. 

I recall entering cursive handwriting competitions when I was a young child (I went to primary school in the 1950s), and the sense of pride for the kids who were judged the neatest writers.

Now, typing on computers and tablets is replacing the act of writing by hand for many students (and adults).

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