Language for technical courses

The language for technical courses should be fairly simple, straightforward and formal, as the content is most often action or task oriented. A few general guidelines to write for such content are:

1. Don't use irrelevant jargon to decorate your conversation. Doing such things will not help engage the learner, but distract his focus from the objective. Instead use short but relevant scenarios and examples that help the learner relate to their job. Relevance is a great attention grabber. For example: As an administrator, you are required to assign permissions to various users based on their job roles. Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.
2. Always start the instruction step of a procedure giving the location of the object on which an action needs to be performed. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.
3. Always give the result of the action at the end of the step soon after the instruction. For example the result of Step 2 would be, The Advanced Controls for Volume Control dialog box opens.
4. Use third person when it comes to technical documentation, but you could selectively use the second person. When it comes to online courses, try and keep a conversational undertone with a conscious effort to keep the seriousness of the topic. This would change if you are creating a story based learning course built around a real time scenario.
5. Follow your style guide, but keep in mind that when you write for online learning you need to bring emphasis to certain words using styles. Certain times style guides do not address the needs of online learning courses. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.
6. Avoid using pronouns often in sentences when you are trying to indicate an action. For example: The sentence, Look up the master list of users, and assign them to their roles using the User Administration tab, is confusing over, Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.
7. Use contractions where they help make your sentences more concise, as unnecessarily long sentences can also be distracting.
8. Avoid using the gerund form of verbs unless absolutely necessary. For example: Use Run the setup file over Running the setup file.

Always keep these guidelines in mind without forgetting that you don't want to sound like a robot and you need to do everything that will help your audience learn complex technical topics better .