Writing to Explain: Real World Writers
Bruce Woods
If I was going to be teaching how-to writing to a group of college students, and it's something that I might want to consider doing, would be to have each one of them bring in an operator's manual for some complicated piece of equipment that they love. And then sit down and rewrite one chapter so that it made sense. Because that's where you can really see bad how-to writing. My favorite one of all, I can remember my first motorcycle, was a Honda C1-10 step-through, remember the little, the red ones with the little white thing coming down, like the Beach Boys sang about? In those days the owner's manuals were translated directly from the Japanese. And they were obviously translated by someone with a dictionary. Not someone who was bilingual. And my favorite passage in it was this illustration, of this guy going "AHHH!" the bike falling out of control, and the caption under it said, "Beware the oil slick for therein lies the dreaded skid demon."

Sandra Carpenter
I'll sit here with a paint brush a lot of times, and… if someone is saying you've got to hold your fan brush like this as you do it, and they're telling me you've got to have your pinky behind it and your index finger here, or whatever, if they're giving me this contorted thing and I'm trying to figure it out, if I can't do that then it's not going to get across to the reader, and then the how-to's not going to work.

Geoffrey Philp
I learned that when I was doing some programming. Central programming for a robot. And it was interesting how steps were left out, because you had to tell the robot, go six inches right and six inches left, because we set up an obstacle course. And many people…many of the students thought that, you know…to get the robot from, let us say here over to …you just said "Go." But you had to put in the actual language: two feet left, three feet right, six feet this way to actually get the robot outside the door. And just that sort of logical: this happens, and this happens, then this happens; you have to be able to do that in a paragraph, you have to be able to do that in an essay, you have to be able to do that in a research paper.

Thomas Clark
You know, if you're building a deck, I don't really care about the personal experience, I want to know how do I put this board down so it doesn't warp, or what have you. That's the important thing. And it depends on the market you're writing for and all of that. But a good how-to, it's storytelling again but a very specific, very concrete, very very structured story. That is, the story of how to build a deck. It's not Cecil B. DeMille time.

Steve Shanesy
To write a thorough, descriptive how-to article is really writing a number of articles within the article because each step is a little story in and of itself. So you have to set up each step so that, as I said earlier, you know, you tell the reader where he's going. For example, if you built a cabinet and the cabinet has drawers. Well, building the drawers may be one step of a descriptive process of building the cabinet. If you don't say, "Now we're going to build drawers," but simply say, "Now cut two pieces of wood this size, and two pieces of wood that size, and another…and then do this joint and that…and then put the bottoms together." And then at the end you say, "Guess what, you just built a drawer!" He's going to have to go back and re-read that part. It's really difficult. So if you set 'em up first and you say now we're going to build a drawer and you know a drawer has two sides a back a front and a bottom. Then say OK now let's cut the fronts, let's cut the backs, let's cut the sides, let's cut the bottoms…and all of a sudden it makes perfect sense. He knows where you're going.