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Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em
Tell ’em
Then tell ’em what you told ’em
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Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em
Tell ’em
Then tell ’em what you told ’em
This is an old adage of public speakers,1 with echoes of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
But it’s actually the principle behind most textbooks, and it’s relevant to other genres such as reports or long form journalism.
Researchers have put a lot of effort into investigating different ways to tell ’em what you are going to tell ’em.
Summaries and abstracts are familiar – short overviews of the next chapter, listing its main issues and conclusions.2
Advance organisers were proposed by the educational researcher David Ausubel.3 They are short explanations that set up appropriate mental schemas to make the text that follows easier to learn.
Aims and objectives help the reader read with a sense of purpose. Aims are quite general, but objectives are specific learnings that can be tested.
Telling ’em what you told ’em might be done through end summaries, which go over the main points again, or through self-test questions that help the reader check their learning.
1. The Quote Investigator website offers various sources: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/15/tell-em/
2. Philippe C. Duchastel (1983) The Use of Summaries in Studying Texts, Educational Technology Vol. 23, No. 6 (June, 1983), pp. 36-4
3. David Ausubel (1960). The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51(5), 267–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046669