English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

At first glance my expert instructions would appear to be the easier one and the novice instructions look to be the harder of the two, but they are in fact the way I labeled them. The expert instructions are for the Taurus Model PT1911. I made these out to be the expert instructions because I believe stripping down the pistol is harder. The whole part involving the recoil spring is very difficult because the spring has so much tension it can be very hard to get back into place and reassemble and I have actually hit myself in the head with the spring the first time I took it apart.

The layout for both instructions is a 7” wide page that can be continuously scrolled down. The purpose for this is to allow the user to have the instructions open while still having part of the screen to work with. The images and text were located on opposite sides of page throughout to give a consistent and predictable pattern.

As you look at both sets of instructions, each are very similar. The novice is in a larger page 8.5 x 11 in. due to I needed more room as I wrote the instructions. I tried to make this so it would be different than just writing. I used large bubbles to capture the user’s attention for each step and to keep them from drifting to another step. I used arrows for a guide rather than numbers, I was thinking for a younger novice, this may be helpful.