English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

In my novice instruction set, I chose to make the layout in landscape as opposed to portrait. It should help the inexperienced reader look ahead and before their task for easier reference. In addition to the pictures provided, I offered the novice readers additional remarks to help them further with the directions. Most of them are tips and suggestions on how to perform a certain direction. I elaborated more in the novice instructions and added a couple more steps that they will need to understand.

As a quick note, the screen captures that are of the entire screen are mostly for frame of reference in the instructions so being able to read the words on the screen is not essential although I will keep tweaking to try and get a better screen capture.

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.

The process that I am choosing for this project will be to correctly use Call of Duty 5 on XBOX 360 in both a single player game mode and an online XBOX live game. I will show my audiences how to turn on the XBOX and all of the necessary steps to successfully start Call of Duty 5. There are many different steps that need to be followed to correctly set up a game, including connecting and turning on your XBOX, inserting the game, and navigating throughout all the menus for the two different users.

My graphics are in the thumbnail documents. There are two: for novices and for experts.

Included are pdfs containing:

• My novice thumnail
• A rough outline for the HTML frame structure for the novice thumbnail
• My advanced thumbnail
• My sample graphics