Instructional Manuals in TPW

Instructional Manuals in TPW

My primary job at Missouri Southern State University’s Student Success Center was drafting a technical manual for a tutoring program they had recently purchased. There was a reason why this task was given to me, and why it has taken so much time and energy: no one could figure the program out.  The program is not especially user-friendly, so the administration within the Student Success Center needed a document that would help them perform the specific tasks they needed to perform with the program, so I had to learn the program, understand the needs of its users, and then understand the condition that the manual would be used in so that I could understand how to approach the manual.

Of course, genres are formed by their conditions of use (Rhetorical Genre 79). I designed my manuals specifically for administration within the Student Success Center, an audience that is fairly limited and consistent. Even within the context of the Student Success Center, I would have to have made different decisions if the manual had been for the center’s tutors and tutees, since those audiences are broader and could conceivably change from semester to semester. Administration must meet certain prerequisites and all work within the same environment, and when you get to know that environment you get an idea of what liberties you can take in writing the manual, but when you do not know your audience so well, you have to reconsider how to go about writing the document.

The context the instruction manual exists in always influences the writing process (“Genre Research” 147). I found that the manual worked within my internship as a dialogue – the administration would ask me specific questions about the program, and I would write a section that answered that question. In turn, when trying to decide what functions to write about for the manual, I would speak with one or more of the administrative staff to understand how they want to use the program so I could better shape the document to answer the questions they might have. This also allowed me to understand the tone and vocabulary the administration staff use to communicate with each other, and allowed me to develop a vocabulary for the manual that would best fit the environment it would be used in. Anytime I was uncertain about how a section was written, I could have one of the administration attempt to perform the steps listed and see firsthand what worked and did not work for specific members of my audience. While it could be frustrating to constantly receive feedback for sections that were more difficult, that feedback made the manual a group project, a symbol that the entire office was working together to make sure they could each use the program.

I had a real luxury having the audience that I had because they worked next door to me. Often, I didn’t have to worry about what topics to cover in the manual because I could listen to specific questions they had. I used the term ‘dialogue’ to explain how the manual worked at the Student Success Center, but for larger audiences manuals work as monologues, since writers do not have the ability to speak with their audience. Because of this lack of interaction with the audience, it’s easy for the manual’s usability to suffer because of the subject matter’s complexity (Miller 162).  Because of this, instructional manuals that act as monologues have a different approach to content and voice. Writers must cover a wide array of topics to ensure that users of various skill levels can use the manual, and a neutral and consistent vocabulary must be developed for the manual to ensure that the largest number of users would be able to understand the manual. These manuals must undergo usability testing more often because writers are not working so closely with their audience, and the test subjects’ ability or inability to use the manuals become the only type of input the audience really gets.

Works Cited

Bawarshi, Anis and Mary Jo Reiff. “Genre Research in Workplace and Professional Contexts.”

---. “Rhetorical Genre Studies.”

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.”