Course ID
Name: Certified Interpretive Writer (CIW) course
Duration: 40 hours
Designed for: professionals who communicate natural and / or cultural heritage in writing. Though no previous experience in interpretation is required, some writing experience is needed.
Subjects covered: interpretative writing for different media (panels, audio guides, leaflets, etc), interpretive critiquing, sustainability, meaning making.
How can the essence of natural and cultural heritage be better captured in writing? This 40-hour course plunges participants into the power of words.
They’ll learn to unleash their creativity, when to be brief, when to elaborate, how to entice, surprise and captivate the target audience. This absorbing course is packed with inspiring exercises and discussions, clever tricks and rules to transform the ‘boring and dry’ into clear, engaging, and informative texts that really engage people. Participants might never look at or treat non-personal interpretive media in the same way again!
The course content includes:
- Facilitating first-hand experiences with natural and cultural heritage sites and objects through interpretive writing
- Dealing with tangible and intangible heritage
- Revealing meanings and relationships of natural and cultural phenomena and the importance of universal values
- Deriving strong themes from sites, objects and factual information
- Turning factual texts into texts that encourage interpretation
- Writing an interpretive text inspired by a heritage phenomenon
- Encouraging active citizenship through interpretation
- Writing an interpretive audio script
- Practicing the Interpretive Writing Principles in all tasks
- Understanding the importance of using simple language
- Peer coaching and critiquing other participants‘ interpretive writing
- Creating catchy headings and applying a text hierarchy/ layers for graphic panels and exhibit labels
To be certified as an interpretive writer, trainees should have previous experience of writing for the public and attend all course modules.
Certification tasks include a written test, a critiquing exercise, developing an interpretive panel and a series of interpretive non-personal media for a self-guided walk that follow pre-determined quality criteria.