Elizabeth Tebeaux - Safety Warnings in Tractor Operation Manuals, 1920-1980: Manuals and Warnings Don’t Always Work

   

    This article focuses on the problem of tractor accidents and the efforts of technical writers to make manuals that farmers will actually read. Ever since farmers began using tractors in the 1920s, accidents and fatalities involving tractors have been high. Despite the improvement of user manuals and safety warnings over the decades, these numbers did not improve. It turns out that these farmers were generally not reading the manuals in the first place. Despite making the manuals incredibly easy to read in the 1960s, accident rates still remained stagnant. In those years companies were making the manuals so simplistic that they even included cartoons and language at an elementary level. Tebeaux suggests that companies at the time may have published these manuals to protect themselves from lawsuit. Perhaps if they had been more concerned with the safety of their consumers they would have hired professional technical writers.

    This article brings up an ever increasing issue in the technical communication field. Despite the time and effort that technical communicators put into manuals, there is no guarantee that the consumer will read them. I think that in today's world it may be more important for a technical communicator to make a manual that consumers will want to read rather than focusing on content. Perhaps a solution to this issue would be for a technical communicator to make the content for manuals and have a professional in the marketing business design the manual in a way the enticing consumers to read it.

Jo Mackiewicz - Assertions of Expertise in Online Product Reviews

Jo Mackiewicz - Assertions of Expertise in Online Product Reviews

    Online reviews have become on of the main features on most shopping websites. This articles asks the question, what determines a reviewer’s credibility. Mackiewicz’s article explores the different way reviewers establish ethos in their reviews. Some of the specific methods that Mackiewicz found are reputation systems, assertions of experience, and the use of specialized terms. Reputation systems allow people to give reviews ratings. Overtime, these rating accrue into an overall score for the reviewer. This allows potential customers to see whether or not a reviewer can be trusted. Assertions of experience are simply statements that establish why the reviewer is qualified to review the product. This can be through having used the product, having advanced knowledge of the subject, or other reliable means. The use of specialized terms that only someone with advanced experience in the field would know adds to the credibility and ethos of a review.

    I thought this article was the most interesting of the ones I read because it directly relates to my life. As an avid video gamer, I rely on online reviews in order to determine whether or not I should invest time and money into a new video game. I find myself gravitating more towards reviews from experienced professional gamers as well as reviewers generally thought of as reliable in the gaming community. This article helps explain why I gravitate towards these reviews even though I sometimes do it subconsciously. When I see reviews that overly criticize a game, I won’t take it seriously until I see that the reviewer is knowledgeable about the game and gaming in general.

Hans van der Meij and Jan van der Meij - Eight Guidelines for the Design of Instructional Videos for Software Training

Hans van der Meij and Jan van der Meij - Eight Guidelines for the Design of Instructional Videos for Software Training 

This article focuses on the effectiveness of video based instruction sets for software training. In an age when more and more how-to guides are video based, the author wanted to test their effectiveness compared to traditional text-based instruction sets. What they found was that not only did videos “yield high skill proficiency”, users were also more proficient with the software a week later compared to text based instruction sets. The authors performed extensive research in order to develop “Eight Guidelines for the Design of Instructional Videos.” These eight guidelines are:   

•    Guideline 1: Provide easy access
        1.1: Craft the title carefully
•    Guideline 2: Use animation with narration
        2.1: Be faithful to the actual interface in the animation
        2.2: Use a spoken human voice for the narration
        2.3: Action and voice must be in synch
•    Guideline 3: Enable functional interactivity
        3.1: Pace the video carefully
        3.2: Enable user control
•    Guideline 4: Preview the task
        4.1: Promote the goal
        4.2: Use a conversational style to enhance perceptions of task relevance
        4.3: Introduce new concepts by showing their use in context
•    Guideline 5: Provide procedural rather than conceptual information
•    Guideline 6: Make tasks clear and simple
        6.1: Follow the user’s mental plan in describing an action sequence
        6.2: Draw attention to the interconnection of user actions and system  reactions
        6.3: Use highlighting to guide attention
•    Guideline 7: Keep videos short

•    Guideline 8: Strengthen demonstration with practice

I loved the organization of the article, everything was clearly structured and visually appealing. Hans van der Meij and Jan van der Meij have created a sort of magic formula for efficient video tutorial. Each of the eight guidelines goes into such detail that you can create or improve any video tutorial on one or all of the eight categories of tips. I also thought it was kind of funny and interesting that this piece was, in a way, an instruction set for instruction sets.

James Paradis - Text and Action the Operator's Manual in Context and In Court

James Paradis - Text and Action the Operator's Manual in Context and In Court

    Paradis begins his paper by discussing how a rising global population and rapid technological advancements are causing the field of technical communication to grow and become more complex. This article primarily focuses two instances where poor technical writing led to litigation. These two manuals were for a so called stud gun. This piece of construction equipment would fire a stud into wood, steel, or concrete. If used incorrectly, the stud could pass through these materials or bounce back to injure the operator. The issue with these manuals was that they did not make clear how dangerous the equipment was or that it could potentially kill someone. The inadequacies of these manuals were dissected in court to determine liability. One of the findings was that “In neither case had experienced manual writers overseen the manual writing process”. Had a professional technical writer been assigned to this manual, these incidents may have never taken place. However, Paradis argues that as technologies become more advanced, writing these instruction manuals will get increasingly difficult to produce.

    This paper was confusing at times because entire bodies of text were missing. For example, at the end of pages 156 and 159, the beginnings of the next pages don't match up. Also, on the first page, there are blank white spaces where sentences should be. In addition there were repeats of the same page even though they were labeled different page numbers. For example, page 160 and 162 were the same page. I found it interesting to think that technical writers could be liable for poor writing. When I thought about the job of a technical writer, I never considered that writing poor instructions could lead to severe injuries or death. I never realized how important technical writers are and the level of responsibility that rests on their shoulders.

Stuart Selber - A Rhetoric of Electronic Instruction Sets

Stuart Selber - A Rhetoric of Electronic Instruction Sets

The first part of Selber’s paper talks  about the impact instruction sets have had on the field of technical communication. He defines an instruction set as “providing step-by-step procedures for accomplishing a physical or mental task.” He also claims that “instruction sets are a priority for the field in historical terms, and perhaps its most obvious and visible hallmark.” He talks about how WWII gave rise to technical communication being considered a professional field because soldiers needed technical writing to help them learn to operate heavy machinery. In addition, wartime technological advancements transferred into the Post War Era, thus maintaining to demand for technical writers. In a more modern sense, Selber relates technical writing to the the sharing of knowledge and expertise through social media. In fact, he argues that instruction sets are “central to the age of social media”.

The second part of Selber’s article discusses the three models of instruction sets. These models are self-contained, embedded, and open. The self-contained model is characterized by “content that is fixed, static, and resolute. One prominent example of this type of model is a PDF file because it is a published file that cannot be altered. The embedded model is characterized as being strikingly similar to the self-contained model with the exception that it is delivered in an environment that enables the creation and collection of user-generated metadata. This is exemplified by online user forums. The open model instruction set is characterized by an “emphasis on sociotechnical features that encourage users to become authors and editors of instruction sets.” This is exemplified by websites such as Wikipedia where users are directly responsible for published content.

Selber’s paper was extremely informative and detailed. It does a great job at distinguishing the three different models of instruction sets. However he did not go into hybrid models as much as I would have liked. The internet is vast and complex and it is impossible for every instruction set to fit into one category or the other. I think it would have been interesting to see the interaction of the three models and the effects they can have on each other when utilized properly. One aspect of the paper I really liked is Table 1 because it gives examples of each type of instruction set model. At times the paper was a bit hard to read as I am not an expert on the subject, but the table helped put the models in a context that I could understand better.