7.3 Instructions
One of the most common and important uses of technical writing is to provide instructions, those step-by-step explanations of how to assemble, operate, repair, or do routine maintenance on equipment or other objects. Instructions come in many forms: short emails, standard operating procedures, manuals, user guides, pamphlets, along with webinars and video tutorials. Although they may seem intuitive and simple to write, instructions are some of the worst-written documents you can find. Most of us have probably had many infuriating experiences with badly written instructions. This chapter will show you what professionals consider the best techniques in providing instructions.
An effective set of instructions requires the following:
- clear, precise, and straight-forward writing
- a thorough understanding of the procedure in all its technical detail
- the ability to put yourself in the place of the reader, the person trying to use your instructions
- the ability to visualize the procedure in detail and to capture that awareness in the steps provided
- willingness to test your instructions on the kind of person you wrote them for
(Instruction Documents, 2013)
Preliminary Steps
At the beginning of a project to write a set of instructions, it is important to determine the structure or characteristics of the particular procedure you are going to write about. Here are some steps to follow:
1. Do a careful audience and task analysis
Early in the process, define the audience and situation for your instructions. Remember that defining an audience means defining the level of familiarity your readers have with the topic. So envision your real audience, not your ideal one. Doing so will help you focus on the content that a typical reader would need to perform a sequence of tasks.
2. Do a thorough task analysis
Let’s use the term procedure to refer to the whole set of activities your instructions are intended to discuss. A task is a semi-independent group of actions within the procedure: for example, setting the clock on a microwave oven is one task in the big overall procedure of operating a microwave oven.
What tasks are involved in the entire procedure?
• Complete a thorough task analysis by performing the task yourself, if possible
• Group related tasks together
• Determine the number of tasks and identify phases
3. Determine the best approach for the step-by-step section
For most instructions, you can focus on tasks, or you can focus on tools (or features of tools). In a task approach (also known as task orientation) for instructions on using a phone-answering service, for example, you would include these sections:
- Recording your greeting
- Playing back your messages
- Saving your messages
- Forwarding your messages
- Deleting your messages, and so on
These are tasks—the typical things we’d want to do with the machine. See Figure 7.3.1 for an example of instructions written using the task approach
On the other hand, in a tools approach t