Week 10 Session: Briefing a tourist
Drafting a one-page risk briefing, then watching someone unfamiliar with it read it cold and revising on the spot.
26 April 2027
Before the session#
Read the fictional bad notice in this week’s lecture, and the three reader persona cards below. Draft a one-page risk briefing aimed at a first-time visitor picking up a rental car — bring it to the session, even in rough form.
Three reader personas#
These are design personas — a way of checking whether a piece of writing works for different readers, not a judgement about anyone’s actual driving ability.
Persona 1 — First rural drive. Grew up in a large city and has never driven outside one. No mental reference for what “rural road at dusk” means.
Persona 2 — Different road norms. An experienced, confident driver whose home country’s roads simply don’t have this hazard — there’s nothing to unlearn, because there was never a local equivalent to begin with.
Persona 3 — Jet-lagged and rushed. A competent driver reading a dense notice at an airport counter at 6 a.m. after a long flight, wanting the fastest possible extraction of the two or three things that actually matter.
In the session — “The Rental Desk Cold-Read Test”#
| Step | Time | Activity |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 5 min | Recap the fictional bad notice and the three personas as a group. |
| 2 | 10 min | Finish or refine your draft one-page briefing individually. |
| 3 | 10 min | Swap with a partner for a genuine cold read: they read it unaided, aloud if possible, and flag anything confusing, alarmist, or missing, in real time. |
| 4 | 10 min | Revise your briefing on the spot based on what was flagged. |
| 5 | 10 min | Check your revised briefing against all three personas — would each of them actually get what they need, fast enough? |
| 6 | 5 min | Submit the Warning That Was Actually Read (see below). |
Warning That Was Actually Read (formative)#
Your revised one-page briefing, plus a two-line note on what the cold read caught that you hadn’t noticed writing it. This is a formative output for this week’s activity, not a required final-project attachment — though if your final-project intervention is a communication artefact, using this as inspiration is entirely reasonable.
Afterwards#
Keep the revised briefing if you found the exercise useful — it’s a candidate starting point if your final-project intervention involves driver-facing communication, but it is optional, not a required attachment.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- your briefing survives being read by someone with no prior context
- you can name one common warning pattern that overstates the risk, and what a calibrated version of it would say instead
Teaching team
- Desmond Okafor — tutor