Francis Miller

A different approach to structuring argument, explanation and learning – for people who have ideas they want to communicate or skills they want to teach.

For more than 8 years, I’ve been developing a different approach to creating effective learning content, focused on understanding the structure of argument, explanation and learning.

You can learn about the strategies I recommend by reading the articles, papers and blog posts on the website. Alternatively, you can work with me to get tailored advice and input on implementing them.

The strategies include:

devices to maintain learner motivation when it starts to flag
providing multi-level content to facilitate easy preview and review by learners

helping learners to navigate effectively between the whole and individual parts of particular content
making the structure of content explicit and easy to understand
making the structure of arguments clear so learners can easily grasp the case being made
capitalising on the computational efficiency of diagrams
developing particular content sequences that optimise learning
using relevant tools to capture the attention of your learners.

Areas covered on the website

Above you can see a map of many of the topics covered on this website.

Click on the button below to read short descriptions of these topics and to be signposted to relevant articles and papers.

Visit Introduction page

My methodology

I help people write better books and articles, create better courses and develop better arguments.

The diagram shows the detailed methodology that I apply to the projects I work on.

There are three key points of difference with many other models of creation:

1. A focus on understanding more about the target audience including their needs and circumstances – and what the learner’s goals are.

2. A focus on developing a learning strategy that will help readers get from Point A to
Point B – from where they are now to where they want to be, in terms of knowledge and skills.

3. A focus on applying this strategy to all the different aspects of the content structure using the knowledge organisation hierarchy.

Further reading

The articles and papers I have written can be found here. My blog posts can be found here. Some of the key themes I write about can be found in the papers and blog posts below.

Organising Knowledge
with Multi-level Content

The paper looks at two of the key problems for learners and those who want to communicate knowledge, which are the problem of structure and the problem of multiple knowledge levels.

To address them, I explain the need for texts to include diagrams that show structure and summaries on different knowledge levels.

In Defence of Summaries: A response to Iain McGilchrist’s critique

There’s an argument that summaries can be detrimental becuase they exclude too much nuance, richness and implicit knowledge.

In this article, I argue that it’s critical that readers have access to both summaries and the detail. That gives them the ability to choose what level of detail that they want.

The power of diagrams

Diagrams can do what text can’t: show the relationship between ideas and concepts at a glance. Diagrams also force writers to condense complexity into a simpler essence.

The article gives examples of some skilled communicators who have used diagrams to explain their ideas.

‘This paragraph is very important’: The role of attention devices in non-fiction books

All books have key passages that readers need to pay attention to if they are to properly understand the meaning of a book. And if they miss them, they will pick up much less of the meaning.

In this blog post, I argue that it’s important that author highlight these key passage so that readers can’t miss them.

Comments on my Organising Knowledge paper