Procedural Rhetoric Project

I rather enjoyed doing this project overall. I have to admit I was skeptical about the project at first, thinking it was kinda pointless because how hard is it to mess up instructions? Then I started to think of all the times I've tried to put something together when the instructions were unclear or you had to fill in the gaps because there were just steps that were skipped over. Realizing I have had some tough times in the past with instructions that were just garbage (thank you Ikea). As we progressed through the information in class I kinda realized how easy it is to create a set of instructions that look perfect to you but to someone who has zero experience it might look like a different language. I think that is the most critical part of making a good set of instructions. Keeping the idea that the person using them may have absolutely no background experience, therefore, it would be best to never skip steps that seem trivial to you. I had an experience that made me realize this, I went home for a weekend before the project was due. I was at my desk studying for a physics test that was the Tuesday following the weekend. My mom came into my room and asked me what I was up to, came over to see what I was working on and was instantly visibly confused with all the various equations and number crunching in my notebook. I replied I was studying for a test I had coming up and jokingly asked if she wanted to learn about axial loads, stress transformations and thermal expansion too. She replied eh no I wouldn't know the first place to even start and got a good laugh out of it. Then it dawned on me that this didn't seem complicated to me at all but then again I kind of took for granted that I'm used to this and have been studying for years now to get to this point. I think the best way to overcome this is to think back to the way you learned something and think of all the questions you had about the task. Anticipating what a person of rookie experience might have problems with and adding that extra step or piece of information to make sure they could get through the instructions efficiently. I had the question of, "could someone who had no experience understand this?" in the back of my head when I was working through my project to be as detailed as possible. Especially since I chose to do CPR for my presentation because its a valuable skill to have and it could be the deciding factor between life and death for a person.

I thoroughly enjoyed doing the project and think it was a good lesson to learn. I also enjoyed the other presentations given in class and learned a lot. The presentations about registering for classes were nice and useful. I already have been registered for classes at that point however and I definitely wished the presentations were sooner because the change in the myniu system definitely threw me through a hoop trying to figure out on my own how the new system worked. I really enjoyed the presentations about basic car maintenance too. I read a statistic somewhere that roughly 66% of Americans don't know how to change a tire and was astonished. Especially since American society relies on cars to get around pretty much anywhere. I couldn't imagine popping a tire on the toll way and having no idea how to put my spare on and to get out of that situation. I thoroughly enjoyed everyone's projects and learned things I probably never would have sought out and learned by myself.