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?

Great post!
Julie

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.