I recently read the article “8 Tips to Write a Tutorial That Gets You Noticed” which offered great reminders of what makes a tutorial effective.
These 8 tips are:
Determine the audience and skill level
Provide a roadmap
Show or list the materials needed
Eliminate obstacles, like jargon
Illustrate, Illustrate, Illustrate
Break down steps and keep sentences short
Find a guinea pig to test it
Title and post it
While a college course assignment explanation page is not exactly a tutorial or how-to, it would indeed benefit from following some (if not all) of the above 8 tips. For this analysis, I chose to examine an assignment page from my ENC 4265 Writing for the Computer Industry course that explains the requirements for setting up a website. In the following sections, I detail what elements of this page are the same as an effective tutorial and what elements are different (referencing the above tips for both). I also share my suggestions on how to make the assignment page clearer.
What elements are the same?
Part of an excellent tutorial is gearing your writing towards your target audience and knowing their skill level. The assignment page seems to have mastered these. The audience consists of college students who may or may not have experience with building a website. The professor addresses the novice by providing a link to “Digital Portfolio Resources” where the student can easily navigate to tutorials for both Wix and WordPress. She also acknowledges those that already have websites both near the top and bottom of the same page.
Another element of a strong tutorial is listing materials needed. This assignment page does so in the form of both a bulleted list and a rubric. For example, bullet point four requires the student to have a location for “Deliverable assignments.” I equate these bullet points and the rubric to a list of ingredients in a recipe book—if one ingredient is missing, the final product will be “off” (or points will be deducted).
Speaking of bullet points, the professor’s use of these satisfies the tip to “break down steps” by avoiding a wall of text that tends to annoy readers. Bullet points also have a way of helping people remember items better than a large paragraph does (at least for me).
What elements are different?
According to the article mentioned earlier, a noticeable tutorial provides a roadmap for its readers. This encompasses providing a photo of the finished product at the top of the tutorial and giving people an idea of the time and cost involved. None of these elements seem to be featured in the assignment page, however, I don’t feel they are necessary. A photo, for instance, is a very specific image, but this particular assignment can go in innumerable directions in terms of the final look. Time and cost of setting up a website is also very situational.
What could be more clear?
While I do think this assignment page is well done, I have a couple of suggestions. Because the website requires multiple components—a “Reflective Writing” section, a “Deliverables” location, and an “About Me” page—the title could simply be “Website Setup” and not include “about me page” in parenthesis after it. This was always a bit confusing to me as I couldn’t decipher why the title focused on the “About Me” page.
Additionally, I think a small explanation of how the “Deliverables” section should be set up could help those of us who imagined creating our assignments in other software (like Photoshop) first and then saving them as images or PDFs. From personal experience, I had excitedly chosen a gallery feature in Wix that allows you to see a small image of the project or click a link to a PDF. Later, after learning about screen readers, I had to reconstruct that section.
Having the opportunity to compare two different genres has been an interesting study. Analyzing assignment pages is something I do naturally—don’t all aspiring editors do that? And, being able to do so formally was an honor.