Yesterday we encouraged you to have fun with words and enjoy playing with multiple meanings as you practice your writing skills, as using descriptive vocabulary will add depth and substance to your composition. This is especially important if you’re writing fiction or poetry, but can also help in your spoken presentations to keep your audience attentive and interested. However, if you’ve been given the job of writing documentation or directions, it’s important to choose words based not on how beautiful or expressive they are, but on how well they quickly communicate accurate information to the reader. Here are three rules to follow when writing instructions, documentation, or anything else that another person will need to successfully complete a task:

1. Don’t assume the reader has the vocabulary you do.

All of the vocabulary you’ve learned in your independent study and from this site, added to the vocabulary you know because it’s used frequently in your job or field of study, gives you the ability to speak and write at a very high level. However, the people reading your instructions may not be at that same level. While you don’t have to “dumb down” your text, be sure you’re not using technical jargon. In other words, if you take the instructions you’ve written and read them out loud to a friend in another company, would that person have a reasonable chance of following them correctly? Obviously, if a piece of equipment is called a centrifuge, you need to use that word instead of saying “the thing that spins around to separate substances into layers by weight and/or composition.” But you can keep things clear by choosing the simplest words possible. For example, instead of saying “Verify the existence of sufficient funds on the credit side of the ledger to effectuate the purchase” you can say “Make sure there’s enough money in the account to buy it.”

2. Include more detail than you think you’ll need.

Remember that the person reading your directions may have never had to perform this task before. While your familiarity with the equipment or procedure means that the instruction to “switch the intake valve to neutral” makes perfect sense to you, for someone who doesn’t know where the switch is – if there even is a “switch” and not a button to press or a knob to turn – this could lead to wasted time and even costly mistakes. You’ll need to say something like this instead: “Locate the knob on the left side of the console labeled ‘IV4’ and turn it clockwise until the arrow lines up with the red letter ‘N’ marked at the top of the panel.”

3. Test your documentation by following your own directions.

One of the best ways to test your own instructions is to follow them exactly, pretending that you’re the end user. This will help you identify places where the details aren’t clear, or steps that you may have accidentally left out. If you have time, ask a co-worker to use the documentation for the same task while you’re observing them, and see where they have trouble.