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Some Assembly Required - A CSA Guide to Writing Instruction Manuals
Introduction Remember the last time you spent three hours of frustration trying to assemble your child's bicycle? You know, the one that the kid next door finally had to put together for you! Or how about the digital clock that constantly flashes 12:00 because you lost the instructions and can't figure out the senseless sequence of buttons that must be pushed to set the time? You are not alone! In a series of consumer surveys conducted by the Canadian Standards Association in 1993, only 49% of typical consumers and 41% of more expert consumer representatives rated instruction manuals as generally adequate. The most frequent cited deficiencies were related to overall readability, layout, and completeness. Manuals accompanying electronic home entertainment products, major appliances, and children's toys were most often deemed inadequate. The recommendations from these surveys, covering such diverse topics as the use of plain language, more diagrams, and better translations, the use of non-expert readability review panels, and detailed troubleshooting sections, have been incorporated into this Guide, along with similar rec ommendations in various other publications. About this manual... In this Guide, we have tried to walk the fine line between excessive generalization and excessive detail. At the one extreme, we would risk being so broad as to appear irrelevant to your specific needs, while at the other we would risk writing a manual that is too long, too boring, and relevant only to that narrow range of products specifically cited in our examples. We have chosen instead to follow the lead of one of the great gourmet cookbooks: outline principles, explain goals, define ingredients
| SDO | CSA: Canadian Standards Association |
| Document Number | |
| Publication Date | Jan. 1, 1996 |
| Language | en - English |
| Page Count | 37 |
| Revision Level | |
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