You could be writing your manual for any one of a dozen different reasons. Perhaps you want to inform employees, maybe you want to give customers additional information or operating instructions for a product. Regardless of the ultimate purpose, your manual’s objective is to show readers “how it’s done”.
They have a problem or want a particular result. Your manual will provide the steps for achieving the solution or reaching the ultimate goal.
And you should also realize that a manual is an evolutionary creature. You don’t do it once and then that’s it for the next 20 years. It lives, it breaths and it changes as the situations change for the readers of the manual.
The employee dress code may have to change as fashion changes. Procedures may have to change as technology develops and is introduced. Life is a series of changes. And each of those changes can have an affect on the material in your manual. So don’t look upon your manual as something that is ever ‘finished’.
And you should also realize that changes will be suggested and demanded even as your initial version is being created. All of them are justified and should be considered.
Leave a manual, any manual, unchanged for six months and readers will start to see more and more comedy rather than useful information.
All this is designed simply to tell you that your manual should take the physical form of something that can be changed and updated frequently. Don’t go for a hard-bound version. Three-holed paper in a binder is much better.
Next caveat—when you write your manual, use simple, straightforward language that everyone, particularly those who are unfamiliar with the material, will understand.
There is a term in language called ‘schema.’ Schema is the stuff you already know about a topic and the stuff the writer assumes you know. If you were reading something about the planets of our solar system, the writer would probably assume you knew what a planet was, that you’re living on a planet at the present time, and that the age of the solar system reaches into the billions of years.
But what if you knew none of that? Whatever the writer wrote would be a confusion of gobbledeegook because you wouldn’t understand a thing that was being said.
You wouldn’t understand it not because you’re stupid, or misguided, or undeserving of the information. You wouldn’t understand it because you didn’t have the basic schema required to understand it.
And even if you did, what if you were reading an astrophysics manual on the chemical composition of some planets. Or a Newtonian calculus manual on predicting the orbits of the planets.
Most people wouldn’t have the schema required to understand either of those two manuals.
So make sure you have a good understanding of what your potential reader already knows before you start creating your manual.
Remember, you’re writing the manual for the reader, not for yourself or your boss. You may understand all the terms used by an insurance company, but I can assure you that the average customer has no idea what you’re talking about.
If you want quick feedback, give your finished manual to a prospective reader and ask them to read it. (Pay them to read it if you must.) Don’t ask them if they liked it. Don’t ask them if they understood it. (no one wants to appear dumb). Ask them what you could do to make it better. That’s where you’ll find the biggest help.
Okay, let’s get started. Despite my caution that every manual should be presented as a solution to problems, or a creator of results, sometimes your boss or client will dictate how they want the manual to look.
I remember my first manual: an operations guide for a small earth-moving machine. Despite my suggestions, the client wanted the manual to simply present the features of the product. So, because I’m not in the business of changing a client’s mind, I gave them what they wanted.
That’s your first goal. Know what the higher ups are looking for. What do they want? And try to get them to be as specific as possible. Ask these sorts of questions: What do you want the manual to accomplish? Are there areas that you don’t want included in the manual? How long do you want the manual to be. (Hey, I can write 1,000 pages on the proper use of shoes, so don’t tell me that the manual should be “as long as it needs to be to do the job.” I want a specific page count, even if it’s arbitrary.) And when do you want it by? Let’s get the deadline set up front so there are no surprises.
For a manual, each ‘chapter’ is going to be about five pages in length. That’s not carved in stone but it’s a good place to start. You know how many pages will be in the manual, so you now know the number of chapters in the manual.
Tell your boss you’re going to have a list of chapters for her by a specific date for her to review and sign off on. Whatever the number of chapters in your manual, that’s the number of topics you’ll offer to your boss. These will be broad category topics… well, broad enough to have five pages of information for each.
Have your boss review the chapter topics, and add or delete as she sees fit.
Okay, let's select the topics. Or at least understand how to select the topics. When you begin to create a manual it can seem like quite an overwhelming task. I assure you it isn't. It's simply a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and, before you know it, you've got a very good manual.
You'll often be faced with the frightening idea that you don't know where to begin. No problem. With a manual, you can begin anywhere and, as the manual takes shape, you can adjust and move around so that the end product is exactly what you're looking for.
Remember, when someone takes a look at your completed manual, they'll be looking at the manual in its entirety. They won't ever ask you where you stared or what steps you used to arrive at the result. They're just impressed with the result.
The selection of your topics should follow a very logical sequence. The sequence, of course, is yours to decide, but if you start at the beginning, you'll almost always end up at the end and have most of the intermediary steps in there as well.
Perhaps the order is chronological. If the manual describes what you should be doing throughout the day in your job, start with the arrival. After that what's the first thing they should do. Then the next, then the next and just write down those topics.
Perhaps the order is spatial. You're explaining the features of a new software program. You start by telling them how to get it started, then, what's on the first screen to the far left, and next to that, and next to that, until you've covered the whole screen.
It always seems a little easier if you cover things front to back, left to right if the topic of the manual lends itself to that format.
Give the topics some order so the reader will feel in sync with the manual. If you jump all over the place, at random, the reader will automatically try to read some element of order into what you've written. And because they have no reference point, they'll assume that what comes first is the most important topic and what comes last is the least important.
Now tell your boss you’ll have chapter outlines for each of the manual chapters on her desk by a specific date.
For each chapter, you need about seven questions that your reader would ask about that topic. If you have more topics, the chapter title should have been more defined. Or, you’ll have to create a new chapter for the overflow.
Submit these questions to your boss and have her sign off on them, adding ones she thinks are important, or deleting those she thinks irrelevant.
Now you’ve got the actual creation of the manual. Simply write the answer to each of those questions as quickly and as fully as you possibly can, but take no more than five minutes for each of them. If you take longer, you’re just adding puffery. Five minutes, then, if you still feel like writing, move on to the next question. And spend just five minutes writing the answer to that one.
The major problem with creating a manual is that the person who has asked you to produce it will often have a different idea of what they want and what is required than you do. That's why it's very important to have them 'sign off' on what you're doing every step of the way. The last thing you want is to produce a completed manual, something you think is very good, useful and fulfills the demands presented, and then have them say, "No, no. That's not what I wanted at all."
A romance novel is a romance novel, and a how-to guide is a how-to guide. But a manual can be anything from the most simplistic five-page guide to a 1,000 page tome. Make sure you know precisely what your boss is looking for.
Present her with a list of chapter titles along with a sentence or two describing precisely what will be in that chapter. Ask her if there are other chapter topics she wants included, or if there are some chapter topics she wants omited.
Creating the manual is an evolutionary process but if she wants a duck and you're creating an eagle, you're going to be wrong no matter how good your manual is.
There’s a lot more information in my writing program.
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