Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
Copyright 2020 Melanie Spiller. All rights reserved.
The Five Ways of Learning
Melanie Spiller and Coloratura Consulting
Have you ever felt that other people seemed to be collecting more information than you,
and learning it faster and retaining it longer? Or maybe that you were the only one following
along and everyone else seemed to be scratching their heads? Or have you felt that your
explanation was clear and concise, and your readers gave you bad reviews and your editor
lobbed dry cereal at you?
The reason for this is that people learn in different ways. Oh, it’s not obvious, and teachers
certainly don’t address all the ways in school. If you don’t happen to learn the way your
teachers do, you’re on your own trying to figure out what was covered in class. And if you’re
one of those people who says, “I never learned to study until I got to college,” it’s because
you’re a Verbal learner, as were most of your teachers. They taught you in a way that was
easy for you to follow along.
I’ll talk about the specifics in a minute, but most people are Verbals. That doesn’t mean that
a Verbal person only learns in one way; it means that their predominant trait is Verbal. It’s
also possible to have one dominant trait and more than one secondary trait.
You can’t really change which way you learn and one way isn’t better than any other,
although sometimes it’s more convenient to be one way over another. But you CAN use your
knowledge of how you learn and how that differs from how other people learn to write
clearly—and to interact with other people’s writing.
There are five ways that people learn. Here they are, in order of frequency: Verbal, Visual,
Tactile, Kinesthetic, and Aural.
Verbal people need to put everything into language. These are the copious note-takers (that
is, in college; in earlier schooling, most Verbals’ needs are addressed in the classroom and
they often seldom study and still manage decent grades) and will even copy their own notes
over. These people are not the ones who put nasty yellow highlighter all over their books,
but they ARE the ones who write (nearly) as much in the margins and on the flyleaves as is
printed on the pages of the book itself. Verbals tend to paraphrase things back to people,
not so much to verify that they’ve understood but because they need to translate into their
own language in order to truly understand. Most people are Verbal or have a smattering of
Verbal. Verbals can be found in most professions. You can’t recognize them by talkativeness,
though. Verbalism is a learning style and not a presentation style.
Visuals make pictures of things in their heads. They draw on the whiteboard while they talk,
they make symbols for things on their notepads, they think in terms of a kind of timeline
rather than a list of dates or facts, and they highlight salient bits in the books they read.
Visuals don’t need to be told why this bit of code differs from that bit—they can SEE the
difference. Visuals find patterns on pages—that’s why they use the highlighter and why they
don’t need comparisons detailed for them. Where Verbals are happy to have something new
described to them, Visuals need to be shown. Visuals give directions by landmarks and don’t
necessarily know the names of the streets or programs or methods. Visuals can be found
dominating professions where insight is useful, like technical management, marketing,
research and development, and in entrepreneurial endeavors.
Tactiles need to touch things. These are the risk-takers; it’s not that they bungee jump, it’s
that they need to dive right in and try things rather than have it described or shown to them.
Tactiles are quite likely to take things apart in order to see how they work, and they’ll insist
on “driving” when they want to show you something new on the computer or when you
show them something new. Tactiles often make logical leaps about how a project will evolve
because they find building blocks among the premises and construct the thing in their
heads. Tactiles learn early to be intuitive about how things work because, for the most part,
schools are directed at Verbals and Visuals. The most common trait for mechanical
engineers and those wow-style coders is to be predominantly Tactile. You definitely want the
guy who works on your car to be a Tactile, too.
Kinesthetics need to manipulate things. These are the people who need to take two things
and add them to two other things to know that there are four things. Kinesthetics don’t like
to work with theory or hyperbole as much as they like to take physical objects and change
them. Kinesthetics have the hardest time in school because they need to make the changes
to words and objects themselves rather than watching the teacher do it. Kinesthetics who
have a scientific bent are likely to be drawn to the physical sciences where the changes they
effect are apparent. People who are Kinesthetic are almost always also Tactiles.
Aurals remember everything they ever heard or read. These people seem to have an
encyclopedic knowledge, because something their second grade teacher said is still vividly
recollectable. Aurals seldom understand that other people don’t have this magnificent
memory and often assume that other people are either not as bright as they are or are
deliberately placing obstacles into an obvious path. Aurals often studied hard, even in
grammar school, but once they learn something, they own it forever. You definitely want
your doctor to be an aural.
There’s no way to tell what style people learn in from listening to them, although you can
sometimes ferret it out by reading their writing or having them teach you something.
Sometimes, even people who know about the five ways of learning think they’re one type
but manifest all the indications of another. It doesn’t matter much, really, unless they’re
trying to write educational materials.
It’s useful to identify which way you learn so that you can make sure the other ways are
attended to in your writing. If you’re a Tactile, for instance, you’ll write excellent step lists or
code, but you might have trouble providing context for why someone would follow it. If
you’re an Aural, you’ll have a hard time providing building blocks so that other people can
follow complex ideas. If you’re a Verbal, you’re so used to information being directed at you,
you might have to deliberately remember that other people learn less verbally and provide
contrived interruptions to your text to allow resting places for less verbal people.
Of course, most people are combinations. I’m a Verbal with a strong Kinesthetic bent. That
means that I’ll take things apart—that’s almost the only way I can learn things—but I’ll
reassemble them verbally. I might quote the professor in the notes I take in class, but when I
copy the notes over, I’ll put it in my own words and combine it with something else. I usually
come up with all my most interesting questions when I’m copying my notes over, because I
need to interact with the language to truly understand it, and once I’ve rebuilt it in my own
words, I can make dandy logical leaps. I suppose that’s why I enjoy editing so much. I do like
to build things (quilts, meals, musical instruments, and so forth) because I like to see how
things work as a tactile would, and I can picture the finished result like a Visual, but I can’t
remember what I had for lunch unless I built it myself and named it.