I’ve found myself in countless work situations where a ‘stakeholder’ (never a content person) of some kind wants to A/B test ‘their’ content against something I’ve been working on. It’s usually a power trip, and every time it’s happened it’s just been based on a personal dislike of simplicity — my proposed solution, naturally.
This looks like the actual problem statement: that stakeholders (any subject matter experts in there?) don’t agree with your simpler copy.
That’s a much different problem — local and immediate — than saying the educational system needs reforming, which I would venture is an impossible affair.
Looking at the immediate problem, my first reaction is to suggest introducing paired writing exercises with those clients, which would allow you to question their assumptions back in a structured way, while serving as an alignment record to move forward with. That would be cheaper, quicker, and probably more effective than A/B testing. Once they see your thinking as ‘observer’ in the paired writing sessions, they’ll likely be singing a different tune.
As for changing educational curricula, that’s a shot in the dark. Where would you even begin? I think anything before high school, and perhaps even early college, is too soon because kids are still exploring the various ways and boundaries of writing in those years, as opposed to how to write in one specific way.
There are many kinds of writing that a student might be drawn to. Creative writing, for example, relies on exploring the depths of dictionaries and thesauri, and where skilled flourishes with the pen can result in more enjoyable reading.
Scientific writing, once epitomized by elaborate note-taking and flourishing descriptions of observation, has evolved to where it is today, an exercise in sentence reductionism, or writing as sterile as a hospital sheet, if you will. But even here, where the aim is to be concise, one must have knowledge of Latin and work within specialized vocabularies, be able to make smart decisions about word choice so not to sound repetitive and unskilled.
Interestingly, scientific journalism emerged as a genre to explain scientific discovery to the lay-folk in more creative and understandable ways, often as stories employing the typical story arc. Journalism of any kind requires creative skill with the language, perhaps even colloquialisms as a given audience might be familiar with.
Sure, someone could offer another course on writing “clearly”, “effectively”, and/or “simply”, and make that a required course in the track for a given “digital arts” degree, but that’s about as far as you could go on the educational front, and it’s probably the right level to insert it, just before hitting the market, to ensure the concepts are still fresh in the mind.
We can probably accept that good writing is akin to learning another language, being a math wizard, or knowing Kung Fu — if you don’t use it, you lose it. You’re back to square one and have to retrain yourself again. Unless one is writing a lot for professional reasons, they’re in a perpetual state of learning, relearning, and conditioning.
I offer all this from my own experience too, not just as opinion plucked from thin air. I’ve taken creative writing courses, have written several scientific articles for academic purposes (biology study), have studied writing theory as part of my higher ed tech comm degree, and I enjoy reading different genres from poetry to longform to biographies to fiction to help instructions and brand marketing. We’ll, maybe not that last one. But the point is, there’s something to gain from all of it, and the more you study and draw from, the better writer you’ll become.
In general, I think the onus is first on teachers, as always, doing a good job of teaching the mechanics, patterns, and theories that are foundational to good communication. Some teachers are better than others, for sure, but that’s a different problem. But the onus is also on the student, their dedication to the task. All the writing guidance anyone could ask for has been recorded one way or another available somewhere. A good teacher can help pull that out and instruct how to apply it, but unless an individual actually makes the effort to practice, practice, learn from that effort, and practice some more, sloppy writing will always exist. That’s what keeps editors employed too.
Fast-forward to the work arena, competent at the writing craft, our focus with clients and collaborators should be on applying a framework of tools and references that help demonstrate success and reduce potential for argumentation. That’s the space where a lot of opportunity remains.
