Over the weekend, I bought a recliner at Costco, which my wife laughingly suggested was my admission that I'm an Old Guy. But before I could, you know, recline, I needed to assemble the chair and figure out how to work it. In our modern era, reclining chairs are electronic, which means there are 5 different controls, which in turn means that there is an instruction manual.
The manual has instructions for how to perform the one required assembly step, although tbh I had figured out how to do that without the instructions. There are also pictures of how to plug in the two (!) electronic connections, though again, these were self-evident and had also been designed so they could be plugged in only one way.
The useful part of the instructions was the diagram that showed what the buttons on the control panel do. Ironically, this illustration is very small for, you know, Old Guys. This is it to scale as best I can render it (2 inches wide):
A curious part of the manual is that whoever created the manual decided that they needed to cast the instructions as a set of numbered procedures. Here's step 2, which is one of the more forced applications of a numbered procedure step that I've seen.
Where is step 1, you ask? I'm saving the best part for last. Step 1 concerns a feature of the recliner that I had not previously thought needed instructing:
("While seated in the recliner, enjoy the rock feature which allows you to gently rock backward and forward.")
There's a lot of fun stuff to unpack here:
- It's step 1.
- Don't do this while standing next to the recliner.
- Imperative "enjoy."
- "The rock feature."
- Which "allows" you to rock.
- Gently.
- Backward and forward, as if there might be other ways to rock in a recliner.
Moments after I read this out loud to my wife it seemed clear that "enjoy the rock feature" has a good chance of entering our familect, as it's called: we now have a stock answer to the question of "What are you doing right now?" "I'm enjoying the rock feature."
But to end on a serious note: numbered procedures ("how-to" documentation) are useful if the reader needs to follow a sequence of steps to achieve a task. Rocking a chair is not a task that requires numbered steps. Understanding what the controls on a control panel do needs reference documentation, not how-to documentation. There are many challenges in technical writing, and one of them is choosing the appropriate style of documentation for what the reader needs.
More dubious guidance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
8,
9,
10
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