A sheet that made sense to its writer

Text: an original contemporary workplace-column-style practice extract.

I wrote the set-up sheet for a folding display stand after assembling it myself. The instructions seemed plain: open the frame, secure the panel, then check the feet. I did not notice that I already knew which way the panel faced, or where the catches were.

Three colleagues who had not seen the stand tried to follow the sheet. One turned the panel round twice. Another stopped at “secure the panel” and asked which catches I meant. None of them had assembled the stand before. Their questions made the missing detail easier to see than another hour of rereading my own sentences would have done.

I rewrote the steps to name the catches and describe the panel’s direction. The next reader completed the set-up without asking me to clarify that instruction. The sheet still could not anticipate every problem: one foot was stiff, and the reader needed to adjust it by hand. Testing had not made the stand perfect. It had shown which difficulties belonged to the wording and which did not.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that testing instructions with unfamiliar readers can reveal where they fail.