Authorship Made Easy (IEB) - Page 7

Authorship Made Easy

The Cognella Guide to Writing an Interactive eBook

Phase II: Writing

There are some specific strategies you can use to get started on your instructional content, but the first and most important thing you can do is reflect on your personal writing style. Then, plan accordingly.

Your project editor can help you identify how to approach writing your content, taking into account what you most enjoy and do well, as well as aspects of the writing that are of concern to you. This is often a critical component in the success of an ebook, so please take some time and talk with us.

STEP ONE: If you haven’t already done so, draft your working table of contents. This does not have to be detailed. It might consist of your main topic list and some general thoughts on what will fall under each topic. It might be a polished form of your original outline. The primary goal of this step is to identify the chapters of the ebook.

STEP TWO: Clearly articulate objectives and outcomes for each chapter. An objective refers to what you want students to learn in the chapter. An outcome describes what students will be able to do with what they learn. Below are some simple examples of each.

Example Learning Objectives:

In this unit, students will learn about:

How to use basic punctuation types, including the period, question mark, and exclamation point;

How to write declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences;

How to recognize audience and purpose in writing.

Example Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the chapter, students will be able to:

Produce declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences;

Punctuate declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentences correctly;

Identify the audience and purpose of a piece of writing;

Articulate the audience and purpose of a piece of original writing;

Use the three main sentence types to write a paragraph for a specific audience and for a specific purpose.

Each chapter should have very specific objectives and outcomes, even if you do not plan to explicitly state these in the ebook. Having specific objectives and outcomes in mind will help you focus as you write. When developing your objectives and outcomes, there are some things to consider:

Does your department have course descriptions or a required curriculum?

Are there mandated state standards for your course?

Is your course a prerequisite to other courses? If so, what must students learn in your course to be prepared for subsequent coursework?

As you develop objectives and outcomes, be sure they align with any standards or requirements your school subscribes to; otherwise, you may not be able to use your ebook in your class.

With your list of chapter topics in hand and specific objectives and outcomes clarified for each chapter, you are now prepared to write your chapter features and instructional content

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Phase II: Writing

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