“Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
— Stephen King, On Writing
King wasn’t the first or even the second person to suggest this — apparently British author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch first urged writers to “murder” their darlings — but King’s quote is what I always think about when editing my writing. Cutting anything you wrote yourself is painful, especially if you had fun writing it. But any good writer, from Faulkner to King, will tell you it’s an essential part of the process. A good writer is nothing without a good editor. If you love something, sometimes you have to let it go. Clichés aside, when I started thinking about it, I was surprised by how much good writing advice also applies to anyone who is compressing or accelerating a course.
Stick to What Advances the Plot
In the same ways that a writer must consider carefully whether an expository paragraph, no matter how lovingly written, or a quirky character, no matter how endearing, actually enhances the story, instructional designers and faculty must let the course outcomes guide what stays and goes.
Backward design is critical here. It starts with spending significant time considering the course outcomes to identify the knowledge and skills students most need to walk away with. Once this is clear, it’s much easier to approach the learning materials and assignments with a critical eye. If something supports the course outcomes, it stays. If it doesn’t, it goes or becomes optional.
Where this becomes trickiest is after the initial culling, when everything that’s left relates back to the course outcomes. This is where King’s advice really comes into play and where most writers need an editor’s help. Even if something is beautifully written and even if it advances the plot slightly, it may still need to go if it’s slowing things down. To determine those final cuts and changes to the course, it’s important to look at learner seat time and consider cognitive load and the overall balance of activities and assessments. Learners benefit greatly from variety in an accelerated format, so it’s good to prioritize different ways to engage with the course content. An instructional designer can help faculty identify which cuts and rewrites will have the greatest impact.
Less Is Usually More
Swann’s Way is a 500-page series of childhood flashbacks. Proust spends over 1,700 words describing the experience of eating a madeleine and the childhood memories it triggers. I’ve read it in French and in English, and getting lost in the meandering prose is essential to the story. It works for Proust, but most of us are not Proust.
The general writerly rule of thumb is that if you can say something in fewer words, you should. When creating an accelerated course, this is particularly good advice to keep in mind for the framing text around instructional materials and the instructions for assignments. On a compressed timeline, students want to know what they need to do, how long it will take them, and where they need to go to do it. This information should be presented succinctly and in a format that is repeated cleanly throughout the course. Students should be spending their time puzzling through Marcel’s childhood in Combray, not figuring out what pages to read or where to post their discussion board take on his infatuation with Odette.
The Darlings Can Live On Somewhere Else
It kills me to cut anything when I write, so I make a graveyard. (It’s nothing gruesome, just a blank Word document where I paste anything I think should go but am not ready to let go of.) Nine times out of ten, nothing returns from that graveyard. But the process of putting the words somewhere else, pretending they may find another home, makes it easier to let go enough to make essential cuts.
Fortunately for faculty, there are a lot more practical places for cut course content to go. It can always be saved as optional, enriching content for the enterprising student. It can also be the foundation of many other types of knowledge sharing, whether that’s a conference presentation or an article. It may also live on in the original version of the course, if it’s still being offered, or become a compelling part of a class lecture.
What This Means for Our Partners
Even the best writers need a good editor — someone with enough distance from the writing to suggest the right cuts. Our Learning Experience Designers act as editing partners for faculty accelerating courses, helping them make the hard choices about what to cut and keep. They make suggestions grounded in best practices, leaving faculty to make the final decisions.
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