The Two Version Announcement Test

Before you start. Open the announcement you actually sent this week and open it on your phone. Not a sample. The real one. What you can read without scrolling is the whole message as far as your students are concerned.

SEED

The one thing

A first week announcement gets two jobs. Tell them the one thing to do next, and tell them you are a person they can talk to. Start with the first job. Not the five things. The one.

1. Which course and section is this announcement for

2. What is the one thing this student has to do next

One action, one sentence, in the order they will actually do it. If you cannot pick one, pick the one that unblocks the others.

SPROUT

The cut

Most people cut the warm opening first because it carries no information. That is the wrong cut and we come back to it in a moment. The cut that matters is the middle: the context you added because you are careful and wanted the message to be complete. Complete is a desktop value. On a phone it buries the two sentences that mattered.

3. What are you cutting, and where does it already live

Nothing is lost here. Name each thing you are cutting and where a student can find it. Almost all of it is in the syllabus, which is searchable and is not competing for the top of the screen.

GROW

The line that has nothing to do with the course

Here is the argument for keeping the human sentence, and it is structural rather than sentimental. Every logistics item in your announcement is available somewhere else. That one line is the only part carrying information a student cannot get anywhere else: evidence about whether you are a person who answers email. A student deciding whether to write to you is running exactly that calculation, and nothing in a logistics block answers it.

4. Write the human line, in your voice

Say it out loud first. If you would not say it to a student standing in a hallway, it is the wrong line. Write what you actually said, not what you would type.

HARVEST

Version B, and the two numbers

Put the human line first, then the one thing to do next. That order, not the other one. Then read it on a phone. If both are visible before you scroll, you are done. If they are not, cut again.

5. Version B, assembled, exactly as you will paste it

6. Which section gets A, which gets B, and when you will count

Same day, same hour, both sections. Then count two things and only two: how many opened it, and how many replied. Your LMS gives you the first. Your inbox gives you the second.

THAT IS ONE

That took about six minutes and it was worth it. Now look at your schedule.

There is a section two, and a section three, and each one needs its own version in its own voice with its own one thing to do next. Then Thursday’s message. Then the withdrawal deadline one. Then the one you send the week nobody submitted. Every one of those is the same shape as the one you just fixed, and every one of them is currently getting written from scratch at nine at night.

The rewrite is not the hard part. The rewrite is six minutes. Doing it every week between now and December, in your own voice, every time, is the hard part.

That is the job the Announcement and Email Drafter does. The live page describes it as class messages that sound like you wrote them. It builds them off your Course Record, so the rule you are about to prove on your own two sections keeps getting applied on the nights you are tired.

See the Announcement and Email Drafter

And do the first one by hand anyway. Do it today, on the real announcement, before you look at any tool. On Thursday you will have your own two numbers instead of somebody else’s claim, and that is the only kind of proof that survives a faculty meeting.