From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides

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Solution: Revise a quickstart guide

Solution: Revise a quickstart guide

From the course: Technical Writing: Quick Start Guides

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Solution: Revise a quickstart guide

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- Okay, so you've taken a crack at it. Let's compare notes. Here are my revisions to the instructions from the local school district's quick start guide to budgeting. You can find them in the exercise files. Your edits might be different from mine, but as long as you use the writing techniques below I'm sure you improved the instructions. You'll see I addressed the reader directly using your, or the imperative form. See here that I also added headings to group the instructions. Another good technique that you see in this handout is to move the supplementary information like notes to before the actual instruction. Finally, like we said before, we begin each step with a verb. How did you do? No doubt there's several ways to improve these instructions, but they can't be left as they were. A confusing mish-mash of overview about the law, and advice about the specific pages on the form. That's just not a quick start guide to anything.

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