Show Your Work Video
Video Transcript
Showing your work helps you to develop a better, more useful way of communicating.
Note:
Dr Jane Bozarth is Director of Research at The eLearning Guild in California, and author of "e-Learning on a Shoestring," "From Analysis to Evaluation," "Better Than Bullet Points," and "Show Your Work."
People are great about documenting what they do, but we often struggle with how to communicate how we get things done.
A lot of times in workshops on this topic I'll ask groups to write out the steps involved in making a peanut butter and jam sandwich.
And you see people really struggle in earnest to write down what they know, to write down how to execute this task.
And you see them writing things like, "Carefully maneuver knife to center of bread on right side without dropping jelly. Working from center out, use knife blade to spread jelly over the bread, leaving a 1/8th inch border at the edge."
You know, that's great but it's not terribly useful to the person who really doesn't understand what it is you're asking them to do. And at some point you just want to cry out "Can't we just take a picture of this? Wouldn't it be better if we made a video of this?"
And that's really what working out loud is or showing your work. It's sort of helping you develop a better, more useful way of communicating that information so others can follow it.
To learn more about showing your work, watch the full video by joining the Mind Tools Club.
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