After reading the assigned articles for this week, they discuss primarily on key components of tailoring your instructions appropriately. The different strategies provided suggested specifying your audience and understanding techniques of technical description.
While tailoring an instruction document, it’s crucial to understand how to carefully craft your content and audience. Who is your audience? What should the instructions include? These are some of the questions that are components of the Five-W strategies embedded in
Chapter 20’s planning and researching. This method will also help in anticipating who your primary and secondary readers are. When describing a specific task for a set of instructions the book uses a great example in “Compose the Picture”. This particular set of sequential order used in the instruction, clearly labels steps, graphics and notes to explain each step. The sequential order gives good directions to know how the audience will approach the tasks and level of explanation.
In Chapter 19, it teaches the techniques of technical description of a document. In a systematic way there is several affective ways to convey your message. A video from Common Craft on “How to use Google Docs “ went through an extensive process to make their video effective for their audience. The video uses simple animation to visually aid the process and steps of Google Docs. By having a concept of knowing that their audience is for new users of Google Docs, the simple level of detail and word choice made it easy to comprehend.
Highlighting a topic from Instructor Blog #4, grasps the idea that our audience are not “idiots” but rather novices. Unfortunately, it can be a challenge to write a technical document that’s second nature base on having experiences. In this case, you might potentially leave out knowledge that might be perceived as tribal knowledge. However, if you were to make it too much of an “idiot” approach you could potentially lose your readers attention.
2D animations
Yeah when watching the Google Docs video I understood everything once the video was over. I was surprised that the 2-D images got the idea across so well. The video reminded me of the UPS commercials where the guy draws the 2-D images to get his point across. The instructions are fun and exciting and make the viewer pay attention. I think that the planning and researching part of making instructions is important too though. Even though the 2-D images get the point across, the narrator has to talk and explain the graphics. This narrative has to either include keywords that an expert would know or normal words that a novice person can catch up on.
OK, but less summary, more praxis
You provide a good summary here, but I would like to see more about how the content in the readings informs our understanding of practical examples and how it might shape our own process of producing technical instructions. Even if you don't know what topic you want to cover right now, you can mention existing examples and how this week's readings help understand them, and then what this suggests that we might do (or not do) in our own work.
Instructions
This is a good summary of the reading material, and I like that you included information about the Google docs video, I really enjoyed that video but did not think to include it as part of my reading response. I was very impressed with the simplicity of the video and very impressed at just how well it was able to get its point across. I learned from this video to keep the instructions very simple, and also to include every single step even if it is a very small step. Not everyone understand things the same way so it is very important not to assume things when writing instructions.