This week’s reading in Chapter 5.4 details
a number of strategies for making complex information accessible and
understandable to a non-specialist audience:
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- Defining unfamiliar terms
- Comparing to familiar things
- Elaborating the process
- Providing description
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- Reviewing theoretical background
- Providing examples and applications
- Shorter sentences and paragraphs
- The “in-other-words” technique
- Posing rhetorical questions
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- Explaining the importance or significance
- Providing illustration
- Providing historical background
- Providing the human perspective
- Stronger transitions
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Your
writing assignment this week will ask you to create a set of written
and visual instructions for a healthcare-related task that you are
highly familiar and comfortable with, written specifically for a
nonspecialist reader. For this discussion, brainstorm a list of 3
possible tasks that you might want to write your instructions on.
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- Share your list of possible instructions tasks with the class.
- Discuss 2-3 of the strategies above that you think would be useful in completing your instructions this week. Explain why.
- Be
sure to define or describe the strategies in your own words so it’s
clear that you understand what the strategy is all about.
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