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.