Writing procedures can be much more difficult than you’d think. We see procedures everywhere, so it’s natural to think that we should be able to write one without too much trouble. For that reason, I wanted to take you through some terrible real-life procedures. This is at least partly so we can all have a chuckle at other peoples’ mistakes, and feel a little bit better about ourselves. But it’s also because it’s a lot easier to find examples of bad procedures than good ones.
With that end in mind, I went through my junk drawer, and pulled out one or two manuals that I had lying around, and I’m going to use them as examples of what not to do as we go along.
The first thing you need to look at is whether you’re documenting a process or a procedure. It’s easy to use these terms interchangeably, but they actually mean different things. The main thing to remember is that a process can contain many procedures. A process gives an overview of tasks: you might need to install the package, configure the package, and then use the package. Overall, that’s a process. Each of those things, though, is a procedure. Procedures are instructions for doing something.
Here’s an example of a certain hand-held computer game. As you can see, the instructions for using the stylus are … step 5? Every procedure in this book is numbered. What’s happened here is each procedure in a process has been numbered, rather than each step in a procedure.
So the next thing to worry about is whether you should be using bullets or numbers. This one is a really simple test: is the order important? If the order is important, use numbers. If it’s not, use bullets. Oddly, though, we get this one wrong all the time …
These ones should all be bullets. You don’t need to operate the product from a power source before you remove the unit from the packaging.
Let’s try this one together: Most of these ones should be numbered, the text even tells us that. The ones on the left under “Cutting Tips” are bullets, the order isn’t important, it’s a list of tips. What about at the top under “Starting and Stopping the Trimmer”? This one probably doesn’t matter, I’d be inclined to use numbers, though, mostly because you can’t stop the trimmer unless you’ve already started it.
And just another one, because it’s so easy: The bullets in red are fine, but then we go to numbers in the purple, and then for a little variety we throw in some upper-case letters in green. Bullets would have been for all of these.
So the next thing to worry about is whether you’re describing a concept or a task. A concept is a description, it answers the question “What do I need to know?”. A task is an action, it answers the question “What do I need to do?”. As writers, it’s much easier for us to think about things rather than tasks. Users think about tasks, though, not things. Remember the old adage about not needing a drill, but a hole? That’s the essence of this point.
This one just has so much wrong with it it’s hard to know where to start. Considering we’re talking about concepts and tasks though, let’s start with pulling those out. I’ve marked the concepts in blue, and the tasks in purple. To add insult to injury, we also have numbers where we should have bullets (in red), because this really is such a hodge-podge of information that there’s no way the order is important. Just to round things off, we also have a typo, and a vaguely insulting term about our children (in yellow).
But looking at that brings me nicely to the next point, which is about the level of detail. Make sure you don’t suddenly change depth in the middle of your procedure. If you find yourself doing this, you might actually need to do more than one procedure, or consider whether you’re actually writing a process. This one is best explained by example:
This certainly isn’t the worst example I could have picked, but it’s interesting all the same: a few of the steps here go into detail about some extra function that your product may or may not have (in yellow), while others are as simple as “open the velcro strap” (in blue). We also have process/procedure issues here, with procedures being numbers in order, and steps getting lowercase letters (in red). This is just confused by the photo references typed in red, and both angle brackets *and* square brackets being used. We also have a few stray bullets in one step. And having said all that, I’ll remind you that this is for a pair of boots. Admittedly, slightly more complicated boots than you’re wearing today, probably, but they’re just boots in the end. Also, I’m more than a little disturbed about the idea of “closure and locking of the foot” (in green).
Everyone knows what anthropomorphism is, right? Someone like to explain it? Yep, it’s applying human qualities to non-human things or animals. We do this a lot, especially to animals, but we also tend to do it to computers a lot.
I went online to find these ones, since I didn’t have any good examples in my stack of manuals. It seems to be something we do almost exclusively to computers rather than appliances, but we *really* do it a lot.
I’ll give you a pro tip: computers don’t actually *think*. They might display things, they might take a while to process commands, but they definitely do not think.
Have to say, though, that going through manuals looking for anthropomorphism does make this one sound slightly creepier than the author intended …
Which brings me to one of my favourite words, and it should be one of your favourites too: parallelism. When you’re writing fiction, you don’t want every paragraph or sentence to start with “Then”. When you’re writing procedures, though, it’s a good thing to have each step start with “click” or “type” or something like that. When you mix it up, it might sound more interesting, but it just becomes confusing. When faced with two statements that seem to be saying different things, users often think you want them to be doing something different. Every step should start with an action, and the same action should use the same verb. Use “click” for a mouse click, “type” for typing on the keyboard, “press” for a hardware button, etc.
This manual almost gets it completely right. Three procedures here all need to start with the same three steps. But in one procedure, they write it using different terms. Is “tilting the motor head back” a different action to “raising the motor head”?
So, finally some takeaways:
The main elements of a procedure are:
- Main heading (‘ing’ verb)
- Concept
- Before you begin
- Warnings
- Procedure sub-heading (infinitive ‘to’ verb)
- Numbered steps
- Reference info
- Related topics
And the things you really need to remember when writing:
- Mouse or keyboard, GUI or CLI? Stick to it!
- Verb (or location) first
- Active voice
- Give instructions, not suggestions
- Complete sentences
- Plain English
I’ve also created a handout with these for you to print and hang up somewhere, which you can download here.
This article was originally given as a public tech talk at Red Hat Brisbane, in September 2012.
