From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Provide context or notes before steps, not within them

Provide context or notes before steps, not within them

From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides

Start my 1-month free trial

Provide context or notes before steps, not within them

“

- We all have that one relative who just can't clearly tell a story from beginning to end. He'll start out, the craziest thing happened to me yesterday on the interstate, which peaks our curiosity, but then he'll start a whole new train of thought. He'll say, who here was watching the news last night? Did you see the story about the baby panda at the zoo? Everyone ends up confused. Do we want to hear the story about the interstate or the panda? Or do we just want uncle Fred to learn to finish the story once he started it? The same is true for the readers of your quickstart guide. When you're writing instructions for completing a task, they want you to clearly provide the steps to follow and they want you to provide any context, notes, or warnings separately before they get started on the steps. Let me show you how distracting it can be when notes are blended in to a list of steps. A copy of all the examples in this video are provided in the document in the exercise files. Here's the…

Contents