Instruction Sets Reflection

Lindsey Burns
ENGL 2311-003/008
Dr. Liu
March 26, 2008

Assignment Reflection 3

Reflecting on my work from this assignment; Instructions, I had to identify my audience and an appropriate content level for my audience. I identifies a goal or purpose for the set of instructions I had to clearly give with an appropriate amount of information, not too long, but not too vague. An important part was to identify the safety and warning issues associated with the goal of my instructions, and end with an identifiable conclusion and any trouble shooting instructions that might happen. The Design of the document was another important part of this assignments work. Visual graphics, spacing or white space on the page, a professional looking document of alignment, contrast; bold, italics, colored font, and repetition to get a point across to the reader.
My invention process for this assignment was to first come up with a conclusion, and possible warnings the reader should know, the materials or items the reader would need, the progressive steps to follow to safely and successfully make a grilled cheese sandwich.

How I determined if my topic functioned more successfully as an instructions set is I went and read back over my instructions document, checked the tone, font, color, graphics and if they were appropriate and went well with the instructions, the quality of the graphics, and the chunking of the instructions.

How my audience influenced the rhetorical and visual design of my assignment is that I had to consider the different types of audiences; the language they might speak and what they might all ready know, and along with the kind of tone I would write my instructions in.

The course goals that I feel I encountered in completing this assignment were analyzing communication contexts rhetorically by understanding audiences, purposes, and situations. This was shown through my understanding of the kind of audience my instructions were intended for. This was also achieved through the type of tone in which I wrote my instructions. I also encountered the goal of creating technical documents that solve problems and improve situations through communication. This was shown by the troubleshooting part of the document. I also included warnings, suggestions, and notes to make the reader aware of and avoid the problems that could go wrong. The last goal I encountered was to design convincing and usable documents and communicating effectively, in this case, through written communication, with diverse audiences in this assignment. I had to consider the audience and the visual aids that were used to help communicate to the reader what the instructions were saying.