4 ways people learn
Remember the 3 E’s
of Better Business Blogging? It's my short hand memory checklist before
publishing a blog post: Educate, Entertain, & Engage readers.
You write to educate, entertain and engage readers when you want to build readerships and get great results with your blogging.
When it comes to educating readers, it’s important to take a page
out of teachers’ notebooks. Teachers know that not all people learn the
same way.
Most of us teach in the style we’re most familiar with: our own
learning styles. If you’re analytical, you’ll teach using data. Your
blog readers will understand and learn well if they’re like you.
But not all readers are the same. Denise is an active experimenter. She wants to know how to do something and needs to try it out before she learns something.
I’m probably more of a conceptualizer: I’ve got to sit and think about something a while. It also helps when there are visuals so I can see how it works.
Everyone has a preferred learning style and we also have combinations. Then
there’s the right brain and left brain to consider also. If you’re not
a savvy psychologist or a teacher, you may be ignoring some of your
readers if you're only writing to those with your own learning style.
What’s a business blogger to do?
Here’s some help:
I’ve taken information off the www.aboutlearning.com
site which explains the 4MAT system for understanding four different
kinds of learning styles. I’ve tried to simplify it so you can apply it
to business blog writing.
It all comes down to how people perceive information, then how they process it – what they do with new information.
As
you write on your blog to educate your readers, remember that people
take in information differently – by thinking or by feeling. In other
words, a ‘feeling’ person will pick up on emotions, personal
sensations, memories, and imagine themselves experiencing something in
the moment. A 'thinking' person will take new information and
conceptualize how it fits into existing knowledge. They need to think
about how something would work.
Different readers transform the learning experience into four different types or styles:
1. Imaginative Learning – Feeling and watching, seeking personal associations, meaning, involvement.
Making connections. Key question: Why?
2. Analytic Learning
– Listening to and thinking about information; seeking facts, thinking
through ideas; learning what the experts think. Formulating ideas. Key
question: What?
3. Common Sense Learning –Thinking and doing. Experimenting, building, creating usability. Tinkering. Applying ideas. Key question: How?
4. Dynamic Learning –
Doing and feeling. Seeking hidden possibilities, exploring, learning by
trial and error, self-discovery. Creating original adaptations. Key
question: What if?
How does this translate
into blog writing for your business? This post is a little long, so I'm
going to review this tomorrow, and give you the "business blogger's
version of writing to educate" with the four different learning styles
of readers. For now, just remember these four questions:
- Why?
- What?
- How?
- What if?
If you like this post, be sure to get subscribe to get updates. I'm
writing a series of post for the next two week on Better Business Blog
Writing. You won't miss any if you're a subscriber because you'll get
email feeds of each post.
Recent Comments