Essay Writing Instructions Text

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For help before the assignment is due.в  if you wait until the last moment to start the assignment and complete the assignment, then you leave no room for yourself to get help if you need help.в practical, easy to follow steps to improve your essay marks. While there may not be one single right way to write an essay, there are wrong ways and, with a structured approach, you can learn how to avoid these. There are also good ways and bad ways to write essays, depending on the essay title and these, too, can be learned, practised and honed. The missing manual is an easy to follow system for making essays cohesive, persuasive and stress free, every time. It shows how learning to write an essay should not simply be a process of trial and error, where error means losing marks by trying to accommodate examiners' past comments.

With a clear, step by step structure, the missing manual offers practical solutions to common essay writing problems which most students will encounter at some stage during their studies, but for which tutors' answers can often seem vague. The missing manual goes beyond general essay writing tips and offers an easy to follow set of instructions for how you can construct persuasive and compelling essays which earn the marks you deserve. You can find out more by viewing our online overview of the ten essay writing stages. is it just me or did nobody teach us how to write an essay? part of the problem is that most of the guidance we receive about how to write good essays is piecemeal, coming primarily from examiner feedback which we receive a little at a time with each essay we submit. If we're lucky, we take these comments on board and, very gradually, our essay writing improves.

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But wouldn't it be better if we just got all the information in one go a set of clear instructions, all in one place? by richard nordquist. In english, is professor emeritus of rhetoric and english at armstrong atlantic state university and the author of two grammar and composition textbooks for college freshmen, writing exercises macmillan and passages: a writer 39 s guide st. And other forms of composition , instructions are written or spoken directions for carrying out a procedure or performing a task. Instructions are often written in the form of a numbered list so that users can clearly recognize the sequence of the tasks. The focus for this chapter is one of the most important of all uses of technical writinginstructions. As you know, instructions are those step by step explanations of how to do something: how to build, operate, repair, or maintain things. One of the most common and one of the most important uses of technical writing is instructionsthose step by step explanations of how to do things: assemble something, operate something, repair something, or do routine maintenance on something.

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But for something seemingly so easy and intuitive, instructions are some of the worst written documents you can find. Like me, you've probably had many infuriating experiences with badly written instructions. What follows in this chapter may not be a fool proof, goof proof guide to writing instructions, but it will show you what professionals consider the best techniques.

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by now, you've probably studied headings, lists, and special noticeswriting a set of instructions with these tools probably seems obvious. Just break the discussion out into numbered vertical lists and throw in some special notices at the obvious points and you're done! well, not quite, but that's a great start. This chapter explores some of the features of instructions that can make them more complex.

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At the beginning of a project to write instructions, it's important to determine the structure or characteristics of the particular procedure you are going to write about. Remember that defining an audience means defining its level of familiarity with the topic as well as other such details. Most importantly, if you are in a writing course, you'll need to write a description of your audience and attach that to your instructions. This will enable your instructor to assess your instructions in terms of their rightness for the intended audience. And remember too that in a technical writing course it is preferable to write for nonspecialist audiencesmuch more of a challenge to you as a writer. How many tasks are there in the procedure you are writing about? let's use the term procedure to refer to the whole set of activities your instructions are intended to discuss.

A task is a semi independent group of actions within the procedure: for example, setting the clock on a microwave oven is one task in the big overall procedure of operating a microwave oven. A simple procedure like changing the oil in a car contains only one task there are no semi independent groupings of activities. A more complex procedure like using a microwave oven contains plenty of such semi independent tasks: setting the clock setting the power level using the timer cleaning and maintaining the microwave, among others. Some instructions have only a single task, but have many steps within that single task. In my own experience, there were more than a 130 steps! that can be a bit daunting.

A good approach is to group similar and related steps into phases, and start renumbering the steps at each new phase. In the swing set example, setting up the frame would be a phase anchoring the thing in the ground would be another assembling the box swing would be still another. Another consideration, which maybe you can't determine early on, is how to focus your instructions. For most instructions, you can focus on tasks, or you can focus on tools or features of tools. Focus on the tasks your readers want to perform use how to or ndash ing phrasing on headings. In a task approach also known as task orientation to instructions on using a phone answering service, you'd have these sections: recording your greeting playing back your messages saving your messages forwarding your messages deleting your messages, and so on these are tasksthe typical things we'd want to do with the machine.

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On the other hand, in a tools approach to instructions on using a photocopier, there would be these unlikely sections: copy button cancel button enlarge/reduce button collate/staple button copy size button, and so on if you designed a set of instructions on this plan, you'd write steps for using each button or feature of the photocopier. Sometimes, the name of the button doesn't quite match the task it is associated with sometimes you have to use more than just the one button to accomplish the task. There may be so many tasks that you must group them so that readers can find individual ones more easily. For example, the following are common task groupings in instructions:

    unpacking and setup tasks installing and customizing tasks basic operating tasks routine maintenance tasks troubleshooting tasks and so on

common sections in instructions

the following is a review of the sections you'll commonly find in instructions. Don't assume that each one of them must be in the actual instructions you write, nor that they have to be in the order presented here, nor that these are the only sections possible in a set of instructions. As you read the following on common sections in instructions, check out the example instructions. Remember that this is a typical or common model for the contents and organizationmany others are possible.

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Make sure it does any of the following things but not necessarily in this order that apply to your particular instructions:

    indicate the specific tasks or procedure to be explained as well as the scope of coverage what won't be covered. Indicate what the audience needs in terms of knowledge and background to understand the instructions. Instructions often must alert readers to the possibility of ruining their equipment, screwing up the procedure, and hurting themselves. For these situations, you use special notices note, warning, caution, and danger notices. Notice how these special notices are used in the example instructions listed above. At the beginning of certain kinds of instructions after the introduction, of course , you may need a discussion of background related to the procedure. For certain instructions, this background is criticalotherwise, the steps in the procedure make no sense.

    For example, you may have had some experience with those software applets in which you define your own colors by nudging red, green, and blue slider bars around. To really understand what you're doing, you need to have some background on color. Similarly, you can imagine that, for certain instructions using cameras, some theory might be needed as well.

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    Notice that most instructions include a list of the things you need to gather before you start the procedure. The tools you use in the procedure such as mixing bowls, spoons, bread pans, hammers, drills, and saws and supplies. The things that are consumed in the procedure such as wood, paint, oil, flour, and nails. In instructions, these typically are listed either in a simple vertical list or in a two column list. Use the two column list if you need to add some specifications to some or all of the itemsfor example, brand names, sizes, amounts, types, model numbers, and so on.

    When you get to the actual writing of the steps, there are several things to keep in mind: 1 the structure and format of those steps, 2 supplementary information that might be needed, and 3 the point of view and general writing style. Normally, we imagine a set of instructions as being formatted as vertical numbered lists. There are some variations, however, as well as some other considerations:

      fixed order steps are steps that must be performed in the order presented. For example, if you are changing the oil in a car, draining the oil is a step that must come before putting the new oil.