How good is your ear for dialog? Find out with Dude or Droid, a simple drag-and-drop activity I created to try out Dragster.
As you decide who said each blurb, notice the cues that you’re responding to. What makes dialog sound natural, and what makes it sound stiff?
Click the image to start the activity, and pretend the “TRIAL” watermark isn’t there. Then come back here for some dialog tips and a mini-review of Dragster.
What did you notice about the dialog?
In the droid’s lines, you probably saw these symptoms of unnatural dialog:
- Lack of contractions (“you are wearing”)
- Obsessively grammatical sentences
- Formal wording (“wish” instead of “want”)
- Introductory -ing phrases (“Upon examining the data…”)
- Legalistic weaseling (“and/or”)
- No idioms or slang
- Buzzwords that no human should say (“key value-add”)
We can make the droid sound more like a dude with a few changes:
- Use contractions: “She is our best chainsaw juggler” becomes “She’s our best…”
- Break sentences into fragments of different types: “If you wish to play the banjo, please go outside” becomes “You want to play the banjo? Then go outside” –and it has more personality, too
- Choose informal words: “wish” becomes “want”
- Replace -ing introductions with past tense: “Upon examining the data” becomes “When we examined the data”
What about “Our biggest deal just fell through?” Why did I make that a dude line? Mostly because it uses an idiom (“fell through”). Most droids don’t know idioms and would say something like “Our biggest opportunity is no longer viable.”
Dragster mini-review
To create the activity, I used version 3 of Dragster, an easy-to-use web tool that creates Flash drag-and-drop activities that are SCORM compliant. A basic version of the tool is available free; the version I tested costs £45 a year.
The workflow is intuitive and fast. Once my graphic was ready, it took less than 15 minutes to create and publish the activity in Dragster.
I got confused once, when I thought I could save some draggable labels and edit them later. Apparently, once you’ve saved the labels, you can’t change them, though you can add more labels.
The technique for defining target areas will be familiar to PowerPoint and Keynote users: you draw an invisible shape over the target area. Because your shape can have an almost infinite number of points, you can accurately define complex “correct” areas. You can also set up “close, but not quite” areas. (I just used super-easy rectangular targets.)
The draggable items can be images or text labels. You can save learners’ scores, and learners can also collaboratively work on an activity and add their own labels. One feature I would recommend for future versions is individual feedback for each dragged item, such as a hint that appears when the learner drags something to the wrong spot.
Your customization choices are limited, but that’s a fair price to pay for speed and ease of use. Learn more at the Dragster site.
Having encountered the aforementioned practicum, it is incumbent on me to ensure that the author will have been advised of its cohesion with regard to internal structure, and, further, it is not to be forgotten how salient didactic points have been arranged in a manner both accessible to the casual reader and relevant to the practicing professional.
Thanks for sharing. I can use that app. And your example is great lesson in the personalization principle. I’ll have to make something similar for a faculty training module at my College
I think tone is a really interesting area in writing online materials. A lot of professions, especially academics, draw status from the use of a particularly formal type of speech (lots of passive voice etc), spattered with jargon, some of which is essential. There is some concern that moving to more informal, speech-like language devalues both the message and the messenger. It’s interesting to see to what extent the internet has its own more informal language.
If you see training as at least in part welcoming the learner to a community (the community of javascript programmers, to take an example close to my heart), part of entry to that community is ‘talking the talk’, so there has to be a mix of registers which can at times be difficult to achieve.
I suppose the job of the materials writer is to get the balance right between informal, personalised language that is usually engaging, like you might use face-to-face and the type of language relevant to the specialism.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Paul, I should have made more clear that my focus in this post was on dialog–what fictional characters say in the course. A story is stronger if the people in it sound like people in the real world. If instead the characters sound like they’re reading from a textbook, the illusion of a story is broken.
I agree that writing style can become a political issue and could affect some readers’ perception of the writer. In corporate elearning, I think our goal should be to make the content of the course challenging, not the language. In my experience, using concise, informal language to present challenging interactions is more successful in most organizations than using complex prose. (I’m often hired to rewrite materials that are too “stuffy.”) Of course, the client’s jargon has to appear in the course, but I think the language itself needs to stay out of the way as much as possible.
Dragster update: Tony Lowe, the developer of Dragster, has emailed me to say that my inability to go back and edit labels I had already entered was a bug that he has now fixed.
Speaking of language… I once built a course for a Prominent Online University. Their standards document said I could not use contractions, because these are harder to understand when English isn’t your native language.
My counter to that was that second-language speakers of English probably did learn about contractions (they’re fairly common, I’d say, and you’ll have to deal with them).
P.O.U. didn’t care, so I responded by putting contractions into my posts anyway.
Dave, I’ve heard the argument about contractions, too. It’s a little bizarre to expect learners to understand “Widget sales are dependent upon market demand and increase exponentially during economic upswings” while believing that the same learners don’t understand “don’t.”
Another argument I’ve heard is that contractions make translation harder. Maybe that’s true if you rely 100% on machine translation, but that’s a far bigger mistake than using some contractions.
It’s even more absurd if you’re talking about second-language users who are going to be reading discussion-board or blog postings by… North American native speakers of English.
To me, the contraction-phobia is another example of “not everything that gets counted, counts.” It’s simple (albeit simply nonsense), and enforcing the rule, like holding meetings, is the exciting alternative to work.
Just wanted to mention that I’ve been working with a package called SmartBuilder from SuddenlySmart.com. They also have a quick and easy drag and drop builder which does allow instant feedback. I often use the feature that allows wrong answers to bounce back to where they came from, show a check mark or x, etc. to give my learners instant feedback as they work on a puzzle.
Great post!
Julie
Hi there
I couldn’t hear anything but found the post interesting anyway, as a French ID working in English, for a lot of non native English speakers like me. Funny I never came across that problem of contractions! We’re always concerned about consistency (using big words or jargons together with simplified vocab) but nobody told me to avoid using contractions. Maybe a US thing?