How Do I . . . ?

(Instructions)

Try to think of a procedure or activity you’re expert in. Maybe you make the perfect cup of coffee. Maybe you can sew a dress or dress a deer. Can you defeat that impossible level on some video game or tell someone how to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the harmonica?

Everyone has some kind of expertise they’re capable of sharing with the world.

Someone else may have occasion to need that expertise.

AUDIENCE

Someone who has never done what you’re telling them how to do.

However, they probably cannot and should not be a blank slate. One of the first steps will be to more deeply consider who your audience will be.

PURPOSE

The audience has a need—for a good cup of coffee, to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the harmonica, or whatever—and they have turned to you as an expert in helping fulfill this need.

Don’t be shy about it. Be the expert you are.

PROCESS

1. Spend some time inventorying your own expertise.

What are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? What do you take pride in? Make a list.

2. Select your subject.

What one skill do you think best lends itself to this particular writing-related problem? Why have you chosen that one?

3. Plan.

A good way of preparing to write the solution to this writing-related problem is to do the action itself while taking careful notes along the way.

4. Audience analysis.

Who is your audience? We know their need (to do what you already know how to do), but what might their attitudes be toward the task? Excitement? Trepidation? Something else?

Additionally, what about their knowledge? To successfully execute the mission, what will they need to know or be able to do prior to engaging with your solution to this writing-related problem?

5. Find and analyze models.

Look for models that serve similar purposes. Stay away from ones too closely related to your own task. You don’t want to risk copying, and also remember that you’re the expert here. You don’t want to be unduly influenced by someone else’s approach, which may actually be kind of crappy.

Look at how these models are formatted and structured. How do they begin? How is the information conveyed? What techniques will you use and choices will you make in your own instructions?

6. Draft.

Doing your best to meet your audience’s needs, draft your document. Use your models to help guide your approach. For our purposes, you’re restricted to “text only” instructions. No diagrams or illustrations are allowed or required.

7. Test draft.

Give your draft to someone else. Ideally, you can exchange drafts with someone else engaged in the same experience so you can get a perspective on this experience from the standpoint of the audience.

If possible, have them attempt the task by following your directions while you do the same with their task. If that isn’t possible, try to visualize the process while reading.

Would they be successful? Where might they be confused or even lost? Identify those sections.

Areas of confusion in need of additional clarity, as well as those elements that work well, should be specifically identified and discussed.

8. Revise draft.

Based on the feedback, as well as any additional insights gained along the way, revise the draft to improve its effectiveness. Think of your audience.

9. Edit and polish.

Even small errors can throw off an audience that’s trying to follow the instructions closely. Fixable mistakes can also shake their confidence in the quality of your instructions.

REFLECT

Writing instructions using only text was probably pretty hard. What could be done differently if you had the benefit of illustrations?

Is the cliché of a picture being worth a thousand words true in this case?

Is there an even better way? Would your task be better learned by a different method? What about a video or other visual simulation? What would be the trade-off between text instructions and video instructions? When would one be more useful than the other?

Or is your task something that would best be done in a live setting, either one-on-one with you as the expert or in a class setting? How would the different atmospheres change the learning? How would your role as the expert change?

What’s best? Given total freedom to craft a solution to this problem, what method would you use and why? How and why is this best for the audience? (It may even be a combination of methods.)

THE WRITING PROCESS

Sometimes when I ask people if they have a writing process, they hem and haw, and say, “Maybe?” “Sorta?” “Sometimes?”

In truth, provided you’re capable of eventually producing something, everyone has a writing process. It may not be a particularly great process and may contain counterproductive elements, but it’s still a process.

In college, under the delusion that I was most creative under maximum deadline pressure, I would wait to get started the night before an assignment was due. To fuel this last-minute process, I would secure a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola and a two-pound bag of Peanut M&M’s, and chug the soda and gobble the candy as I worked. No one would confuse my college academic record with the work of a highly dedicated and accomplished student, but it got the job done.

Except . . . there was one time when I’d finished an essay at around 4:00 a.m., early by my standards, and when I tried to go to bed, I realized my heart was threatening to pound its way out of my chest. I’d managed to nearly overdose on caffeine.

And there was that other time when I procrastinated writing a short story for a creative writing class and, as the time grew shorter and shorter and nothing came, found myself writing a story about a college student with writer’s block who had a story due for class in a few hours, and I knew I was doomed, doomed, doomed.

My process tended to be to put things off as long as possible, fire out something when I had no other choice, print it out, and turn it in. I would sometimes get my papers returned and see errors that were downright embarrassing but not surprising, because I hadn’t actually read the whole thing again after I typed the final word.

In the “How Do I . . . ?” experience, I semiforced you to follow a writing process. But even within that process, you likely marched to the beat of your own drummer.

Everyone has a writing process because writing is a process. A significant part of the writer’s practice is being mindful about, and seeking to refine, one’s process. The writing process consists of the following stages:

1. Prewriting

2. Drafting

3. Revision

4. Editing

5. Polishing

PREWRITING

These steps can look very different depending on what’s being written. A deeply researched piece may call for weeks of work in the prewriting stage and require a detailed outline before even beginning.

The prewriting period for a poem could consist of no obvious work, like library research or an outline, but may take years. If the poet is an adult looking back on something from their childhood, all the time between the incident and the starting of the writing process could be seen as prewriting.

Procrastination is prewriting. Provisioning (Coca-Cola and Peanut M&M’s) is prewriting. So is reading, research, planning, thinking. I do a significant amount of prewriting while walking the dogs or exercising, as my mind drifts to what I’m about to do.

This doesn’t mean prewriting has to be haphazard, though. A planned, deliberate approach to the prewriting period helps make the drafting process go more smoothly.

DRAFTING

Once words that have some potential of winding up in the final product start hitting the page, you’re drafting. Prewriting may involve writing like brainstorming or mind-mapping, but until you’re intentionally working on the document, you aren’t drafting.

One of the mistaken notions I often see in people developing their writing practices is a belief that you start drafting only once you’ve figured out what you want to say.

Instead, we should think of the drafting stage as the process of figuring out what we have to say. Writing is thinking.

A draft is a stage of discovery in which we should be sensitive to fresh ideas and insights. Drafting may send us back to prewriting—for additional research or brainstorming or to reconsider an outline. This is to be expected.

Drafting is a tool that allows thinking to happen. We are not recording thoughts that already exist. We are uncovering the thoughts in real time.

There is no right way to draft. Some people are tortoises, others hares. Some dart forward quickly, only to retreat to go over the previous paragraph or page (this is me). Some people write sequentially, others jump from idea to idea, not worried about how they will fit together. I have even known people who write the end first, so they know where they should be heading (though often the end changes before they get there).

As long as words are hitting the page and you are thinking, you’re fine. You’re drafting.

REVISION

Many students I’ve worked with have never engaged in a genuine revision process, instead skipping all the way to editing. This is not their fault. School often doesn’t allow for a robust revision process because deadlines and production are prioritized, and time is often not sufficient.

Revision is seeing (vision) again (re-), and it is a step during which writers can think fresh about what they’ve done and what they’re trying to do next, having learned so much in the thinking and drafting process. I often finally write my way into what I meant to say the whole time at the end of the initial draft. Once this happens, I have to go back and rework the piece from the beginning in order to properly reflect my new discovery.

I’m fortunate enough in my work to have time to do this. The experiences in this book are designed to allow time to revise, and to give some direction to help with a productive approach to revision.

But we should also recognize that revision is never done. Just because something has been turned in doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it someday or won’t see something that can be improved. I will pick up this book in its finished, printed, and bound form, open to a random page, and find something I want to change.

EDITING AND POLISHING

These are two different stages, but they often happen concurrently, or overlap as we move back and forth between them.

Editing is the shaping of the writing after the ideas are essentially in place. The bulk of the thinking is over; now it’s a matter of making specific language choices to highlight those ideas.

Polishing is the final touch on that process—brushing away the last bits of fluff on the finely cut garment.

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Everyone’s writing process is unique; there’s no one right way to write.

How do you feel about your process in the “How Do I . . . ?” experience? Compare it to the process you used to write instructions for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

What was different? What aspects of the process do you want to carry forward? What parts of your process do you think you need to work on?