September 2016
Participation Supplement 4
Over the last couple of days, one of the topics we have went over is that of writing instructions.  I didn’t realize that there was a standard way to write a good set of instructions, I always assumed that as long as the audience could get through the steps successfully then that was all that mattered.  Now that I have heard the discussion though, I can see why there would be a benchmark in writing instructions or manuals.  You have to be informative and deliberate when writing the steps, warnings, and various other topics.  If you are not, then you could cause confusion and possibly even hard to someone or someone's possessions.  I can imagine that there would be a strong job market for technical writers who can write great instructions.  This seems like a very desirable skill for almost any company or university.  I can think of my former job working as a contact center employee, there were certain procedures and rules we had to follow and we didn’t have an official manual or instructions.  There were actually many of my fellow employees who had created their own three-ring binders full of instructions on how to handle certain situations.  The company I worked for should have spent some time and money and had professional technical writers to create an in-depth manual for the contact center employees.  It would have made the job a bit easier and less stressful, it would have removed some of the gray areas that were sometimes involved in the job.