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Home > Rants > How to organize a step-by-step procedure. > Put instructions into discrete steps. |
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Put instructions into discrete steps.Steps are the heart of a procedure. Each step specifies an action that your users take on the way toward accomplishing their goal. When you make each step clear and easy to follow, you make the whole procedure memorable. In that way, you ensure that the skill will be transmitted intact to the reader, developing the reader's expertise. Steps look easy to write, but they take more rewriting than almost anything else in a procedure. To write a good step, you have to consider a multitude of possibilities, while focusing on the experience of the user, moment to moment.
Ill-considered steps lead readers to make mistakes, slow them down, and increase their sense of helplessness. |
Additional detail on instructions: |
Make each step a discrete object. Putting each instruction in its own step, as a distinct object, has several benefits:
As an object, an instruction's job is to answer the question, "What should I do next?" with one meaningful action. Guidelines on writing instructions To make sure that your steps work for your users: |
Resources: Help (A chapter from Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. PDF: 995K, or about 18 minutes at 56K).
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Was I supposed to put shaving soap on this brush before I rubbed my face?
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