View PDF of Adobe InDesign Help: An Introduction
Students in the Masters in Professional Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University are required to take several courses that involve using Adobe InDesign. However, many students enter the program with little to no background in using the software, and teaching an entire course on it would be an inefficient use of time. To help future students learn InDesign, my cohort wrote sets of technical instructions on features that they would find most relevant. I explained the Help feature, which I felt would enable those future students to take on tasks using features that could not be covered in the final set of instructions. I had to learn the Adobe InDesign Help feature and then explain it to a non-expert audience. Because the Help feature is a highly conceptual topic, I implemented a reading-to-learn strategy that made use of spatial associations.
Date Written
November 2014
Target Audience
Incoming MAPW students with little to no background in Adobe InDesign
Skills Developed
- Learning a skill with the purpose of explaining it
- Explaining a complex topic through a conceptual lens
- Using Adobe InDesign to create associations between instructive text and relevant visuals with spatial orientation