Teacher Notes on Instruction-Writing Exercises

Exercise 1: How to cook new potatoes

Context for this case:

Prerequisites:
  • Simple recipe with features commented.
  • One raw potato (to show).

Cognitive Apprenticeship Features:
  • Spells out the guideline(s) applied in each step.
  • Simple but authentic.

Supporting References:
Relevant CA Content Standards  
Goal:
To show how good instructions exemplify the instruction-writing guidelines, and how writers carefully deploy the features within good instructions to anticipate the needs of their readers.
Strategy:
This is the first in a series of exercises that explore instructions by means of actual (although slightly modified) cooking recipes. For students with weak writing skills who are just learning how to write instructions, cooking recipes offer a very sound surrogate for software documentation or other abstract engineering topics:
(1) Rhetorical Features.
Recipes involve all the same rhetorical features an any effective instructions, but they presuppose no special scientific knowledge nor level of expertise with any particular computer software. Nevertheless, they afford ample practice attending to word and label choice, planning text structure, and even managing technical (kitchen, not laboratory) terms and distinctions.
(2)Usability.
Technical writing always aims for usable instructions (not elegant or interesting, though they often are, but genuinely helpful to the readers who depend on them to perform important tasks). Recipes pose all the same crucial usability issues as do instructions in industry:
(a) can readers quickly and reliably understand the steps?
(b) are the instructions relevant to the task? (right grain size? enough detail but not too much? safe?)
(c) can readers easily find what they need to know? (correct order? clear layout? formatting that reveals content?)
(3) Gender Neutrality.
Cooking recipes are not frivolous (indeed, publishing good recipes is lucrative business), but they are familiar. I have found that female and male students alike are comfortable discussing what makes a recipe usable, and on an even footing.
(4) Reading Ease.
The recipes on which these exercises are based have many easy words and short sentences. This enables even students who are hesitant readers to actively participate in studying the cases and solving the writing problems that they pose.
TEACHING TIPS:
The STUDENT and ANNOTATED versions of Exercise 1 are the same. The overt scaffolding along the right side of the recipe focuses student attention on how each step exemplifies one (or more) of the instruction-writing guidelines. Every step here represents a careful choice by the writer of this recipe. Several alternative choices are available for each step, and most of them would be less appropriate, less helpful to the reader. Exercise 1, simple as it is, lets students see that writing instructions is not magic or guesswork, but a careful design process in which they must (repeatedly, at each step) choose among several rhetorical alternatives to build the most helpful series of steps that they can.

When I teach this exercise I bring along a new potato to illustrate this "technical term." I point out that with an overt action verb beginning each step, confirming that there are no complex steps to subdivide is easy. And I note that "until they are done" (step 4) could be improved into "until they are soft" to reveal how to detect doneness empirically.

DRIVING-DIRECTIONS ALTERNATIVE:
If you want to preface this recipe analysis with another, even more basic (but still authentic) case, try end-to-end driving directions from Mapquest. Itemized, icon-marked, step-by-step instructions for driving (from your home to school, perhaps) are easy to read (an ideal starter for special education or ESL students) and "naturally" scaffolded, yet they offer a real-life case where usable instructions are crucial for success. Projected or copied large, they provide another colorful, practical, introductory model for applying the good-instruction guidelines.

Case:
Student and Annotated version:
Example of GOOD instructions that apply the guidelines.

(1) How to cook new potatoes
                                         Effective features:

                                         VISUALLY DISTINCT LIST
1. Boil:
   enough water to cover potatoes        OVERT COMMANDS, ACTION VERBS

2. Wash well:
   12 new potatoes                       ORDER CORRECT

3. Drop them into:
   boiling water to cover                NO COMPLEX STEPS

4. Cook:
   covered,                              NEEDED DETAILS INCLUDED
   until they are done,
   about 20-30 minutes                   IRRELEVANT DETAILS EXCLUDED

5. Serve:
   with parsley
Note:
This exercise most closely supports the following 1998 California English-Language Arts content standard(s).
Reading:
Grade 5--"Understand how text features make information accessible and usable" (p. 28).
Grade 6--"Follow multi-step instructions" (p. 36).
Writing:
Grade 8--"Write technical documents...identify the sequence of activities needed to design a system, operate a tool..." (p. 51).

Contact: T. R. Girill trgirill@acm.org