Plain Language Workshop Descriptions: How to Attract Participants from all Disciplines

Abstract

At the University of Oklahoma (OU) Libraries, we offer a variety of research workshops each semester, many focusing on file and data management and analysis. We find that STEM field practitioners usually recognize they need these skills and saw themselves in the wording we advertised for the workshops. However, with our libraries’ strong emphasis on digital scholarship and digital humanties, we wanted to make sure these skills reached everyone who needed them. To increase the impact of research and data workshops and help workshop organizers make their event descriptions understandable and appealing to a wider audience, volunteers representing varied disciplinary backgrounds in our library system met to develop plain-language guidelines. The three key principles for our plain-language guidelines are: make workshop goals obvious, supplement jargon with explanations, and use broad or discipline-agnostic descriptors so people recognize relevance to their work. We describe the process we used to converge on these principles, describe the review process for new workshop descriptions, and show a “before and after” example. While the process and advice we provide are specific for our data-focused workshops, the principles could be applied to ensuring broad audiences and marketing for any type of workshop description.