Teacher Notes on Instruction-Writing Exercises

Exercise 8: What to do if you spill rubber cement

Context for this case:

Prerequisites:
  • Illustrated sample instructions.
  • Rubber cement (jar) and 3-by-5-inch cards.

Cognitive Apprenticeship Features:
  • Models authentic (simple) instructions with pictures.
  • Reveals "the magic" behind making useful technical art.

Supporting References:
Relevant CA Content Standards  
Goal:
To introduce the role of well-designed technical art in making complex instructions (more) effective for readers.
Strategy:
Exercise 8 is the first of this set to include technical illustrations. Although software documentation seldom involves (drawn) figures, instructions for physical processes (as here) are often illustrated for clarity. But just as the words in a recipe are not always helpful, so too the illustrations are not always clarifying. Exercise 8 shows how well-designed art can improve instructions, while Exercise 9 (next) shows how poorly designed art (like poorly chosen text) can leave readers confused.
APPROACHES:
When I teach this exercise I bring along a jar of rubber cement and display the contents for students who don't know what it is (rubber cement is a jelly-like nonpermanent adhesive often used to gently mount paper or cardboard without wetting it).
After discussing the issues in this exercise (below), I point out that technical art is not magic. It comes from trained and practiced technical illustrators, just as technical text comes from trained and practiced technical writers. In real-life technical careers, the two often collaborate to design relevant, effective illustrated instructions. Learning to work with technical artists and to critically review the draft art as well as the draft text of a project for weaknesses is an important part of writing effectively at work.
ISSUES:
One of the features that make good instructions usable (easy to navigate and even to understand) is their visual effectiveness. This partly involves "seeing the text" with the help of overt steps and itemized lists (virtually unknown in prose fiction), as all of these exercises practice. But sometimes visual effectiveness also calls for supplementing the words with pictures, usually with drawings carefully designed to meet reader needs. The illustrations in Exercise 8 (below) introduce several important ways in which good technical art meets reader needs:
(1) They show actions, not just things. Instructions list (reader) actions in order, and these figures show reader actions in order.
(2) They present the clean-up steps from the user's point of view. They do not show how someone else watching a spill from the sidelines would see it cleaned up, but rather how someone confronting a spill themselves would clean it up. This is just what good instructions should do.
(3) The pace and sequence of the figures allow them alone to almost take the place of written instructions (perhaps for an international audience). They are very task oriented and need minimal commentary.

The STUDENT and ANNOTATED versions of Exercise 8 (like Exercise 1) are the same, intended to show well-designed text and art complementing each other to meet reader needs. These specific moves come from a much larger array of techniques known to make technical illustrations effective; for more examples (many related to map design), see Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990). (This exercise has been generously adapted for this project by artist Brett S. Clark from an idea on p. 109 of Bill Gray's influential Studio Tips, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1976.)

Case:
Student and Annotated version:
1. Keep a stack of small (3-by-5-inch) stiff cards near
   where you use rubber cement (Fig. 1).



2. WARNING: if rubber cement spills, act fast (Fig. 2).



3. Stand the container upright and off to the side.

4. Gather the spilled cement by using two of the cards,
   one in each hand, as shown (Fig. 3).



   a. If the cement spilled on a clean surface,
      scoop the cement back into the original
      container (repeat until it is all recovered, Fig. 4).



   b. If the cement spilled on a dirty area,
      scoop the cement on to a piece of newspaper
      or into a disposable container.
      Deposit it in a trash can.
Note:
This exercise most closely supports the following 1998 California English-Language Arts content standard(s).
Reading:
Grade 5--"Understand how text features (e.g., format, graphics, sequence...) make information accessible and usable" (p. 28).
Grade 9/10--"Analyze the structure and format of functional workplace documents, including graphics..." (p. 56).
Writing:
Grade 11--"Enhance meaning by employing rhetorical devices, including...the incorporation of visual aids" (p. 69).

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