The Importance Of Clarity

In a stack of papers called Instruction.

  • Dec
  • 31
  • 2007

Something about an easy message, this video stuck out to me. The rest of The IT Crowd is hilarious and worth watching, from what little I’ve seen, but this piece should be in all the teacher ed schools. Imagine if something simple like 911 (or the even simpler 999 in England, apparently) changed to something difficult: 0118 999 881 999 119 7253. Are you changing any 911s in your classroom? Is anything more complex than it absolutely needs to be? Imagine if we could do the opposite and turn something difficult into something simple. A large part of the transformation in either direction comes down to how you present information. I give you The IT Crowd:

As always, I have the QuickTime version ready for your convenient download ’cause I’m sure your district’s internet filter blocks YouTube, even in the distant future of 2008.

That’s So 0118 999 881 999 119 7253

Grammar/syntax is a big 0118 999 881 blah blah. It doesn’t make sense to most students. I’m trying to turn at least the beginnings of it into 911, simplifying common grammatical terms that will give us the most mileage to discuss writing (big shout out to my buddy Ted for this). Eventually, we’ll turn things like Present Participial Phrases into acronyms that don’t appear anywhere near as scary (c’mon, does PPP scare you?) and introduce sophisticated sentence structures as formulas of letters. The practical application comes in increased sentence variety and complexity, not just repeated simple sentences (D+S+V).

A few clicks away from yet another link in WordPress News, thanks to Sifry for pointing this out.

Happy New Year’s Eve and enjoy the funny video.

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