Activity Summary:

This presentation and activity will introduce students to the genre of Instructions.

Instructions:

This presentation discusses the genre of instructions, which your students should be working on in ENGL 314. Teaching readers how to complete a process can seem like a straightforward task, but there are many rhetorical and functional considerations involved in developing a successful set of instructions. The information contained in this presentation is derived from the textbooks of Richard Johnson-Sheehan and Paul V. Anderson.

The activity at the end of this presentation requires you to bring in some mouse traps. Bring enough traps so that each student group (of 3 or 4) has one to work with. This activity can take two class periods for students to complete.

This presentation covers the following:

• Assessing the rhetorical context of instructions
• Organizing instructions by major and minor steps
• Writing the introduction and conclusion
• Wording and presenting the steps
• Analyzing example instructions
• Developing a set of instructions from scratch (activity)