Teacher Notes on Instruction-Writing Exercises

Exercise 0: Guidelines used in the other exercises

Context for this case: Other versions: Plain, printable for students. Comparable guidelines for writing descriptions. Introduce these guidelines by "touring" them with DNA-extraction instructions.

Guidelines for Writing Good Instructions Organization Are the steps presented in the order in which they are performed? Is the first step really the first task that someone in the audience needs to do? Should a long or complex step be broken into smaller parts? Are all hidden steps made explicit? Clarity Is each step written as an overt command (beginning with an action verb)? Are all steps easy to find and visually distinct? List format? Bullets or numbers needed? Is each step precise and complete enough to be followed? Includes needed details? Excludes irrelevant text? Are common problems covered? Safety/danger warnings? Troubleshooting tips?

Three Roles for These Guidelines

1. Audience analysis.
   The guidelines introduce the importance of writing for and helping an audience that depends on what you say. This concept will be new to many students, who expect to write only for the teacher. Reviewing the guidelines points out that technical texts (and especially instructions) have real readers, that the readers need the writer's help to do something, and that just what the writer says can make a big difference in how helpful the instructions are.
2. Reading Critically.
   The guidelines help students learn to read critically by focusing their attention on the specific features "at work" in real-life instructions. Instructions are seldom drafted optimally the first time, so reading instructions critically (other people's and one's own as well) is crucial for good editing and self-editing. The guidelines are a slightly formulaic but psychologically well grounded look inside instructions to see what makes them helpful or unhelpful for the readers that depend on them.
3. Repair Techniques.
   The guidelines provide students with an overt, shared repertoire of techniques for repairing the flaws that they find in instructions. The guidelines offer goals to strive for in good instructions, and ways to improve every weak step found. Finally, the guidelines are a kind of loaned experience: they make explicit for beginners what working professional writers know implicitly through long practice.

Giving a Guideline Tour

An easy, focused way to introduce each of these guidelines to students is to "tour" through them using some authentic laboratory instructions to illustrate how they work. For example, Regina Bailey's 13-step process for extracting DNA from human cheek cells, posted at
http://biiology.about.com/c/ht/00/07/How_Extract_DNA_Human0962932481.htm
does this job nicely. Many alternatives exist, but Bailey's instructions are realistic yet simple enough to be workable in one period with only ordinary supplies. They provide great guideline cases:

• Every Bailey step really is a command, with the verb first to make clear what action to take next.
• The separate steps are clearly marked, even sequentially numbered.
• The steps include relevant detail needed to perform them, without irrelevant distraction.

• Some steps (6 and 8) are really complex (they involve two separate tasks each of which could be its own step).
• One step (3) is apparently not needed (its results are never used later, so it could be omitted without harm).
• A missing step ("chill the alcohol," inserted between 8 and 9) needs to be added for practical success (most DNA-extraction instructions call for chilled alcohol).

I always introduce instruction-writing guidelines before, not after, the exercises to which they apply. And I suggest explicitly invoking them in every subsequent lesson. They tie the separate exercises together: an easy way to review at the start of each lesson, an overt focus for practice, and a shared evaluation standard. I have even hung the guidelines in the classroom as a 3-by-4-foot poster to provide visual continuity and a tangible resource for student writers.

Comparison with Sue Mehlich

Many items in the guidelines here overlap with those that Sue Mehlich includes in her Technical Communication: Writing Instructions (Perfection Learning, 1997, 32 pp.), a short high-school technical writing text. Mehlich's most relevant passages are the brief "Guidelines for Writing Instructions" (p. 19, two thirds through the text) and "Planning Strategies for Revising Instructions" (p. 25, almost at the end of her text). Her guidelines also include general writing issues (e.g., grammar) and even graphics issues that fall outside the scope of instruction writing itself. I aim not for an all-purpose composing checklist, but rather for a way to overtly share specific techniques with students for whom those techniques are likely to be unfamiliar (or confusing if left implicit).

Guideline Commentary by Patricia Wright