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Home > Rants > How to organize a step-by-step procedure. > The name is a menu item |
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The name is a menu itemYour guests will be trying to find this particular procedure among hundreds, or thousands of other procedures. So write the name to express the procedure's content in terms that the guests actually use (their terms, not yours). And because the name appears as part of a menu, your language should also show why you put this procedure into that particular group, at this particular position in the sequence. You need to distinguish this procedure from others like it, while showing, through your choice of words, how they are all related (why they belong together on a menu). Neat challenge. In this context, you are writing a single phrase that
Another constraint: you should adopt a consistent grammatical form for the names of all procedures ("How to…" or "Doing…." or "To do this…."). The point is to telegraph to users that every item with that kind of phrase will be a set of step-by-step instructions. You are articulating the information type, so users can choose a procedure when that is what they want, or skip it when they want some other kind of information. Tip: Distinguish between similar procedures by writing the similar aspects in the same way, then emphasizing differences at the beginning or end. A name of the procedure is not just the heading or title advertising a section you are about to write. It appears in many other locations. So:
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Resources: Help (A chapter from Hot Text: Web Writing that Works. PDF: 995K, or about 18 minutes at 56K). |
Make the name of the procedure answer the user's question: "Does this describe the task I want to perform?" People talk to
themselves, describing the challenge, or goal, or problem in their own
terms. Use their
words for actions, events, tasks, things, and user interface elements. (Do
not use terms that only an engineer would recognize).
Examples of names for
procedures
Before
Base unit attachment routine
Wall-mount position demarcation
Attaching the base unit
Marking the spot where you want to mount the phone on the wall
Before
Tracing Paths
Doing Rectangles
Polygon Representation
Circle Creation Implementation
To Draw Rectangles
To Draw Polygons
To Draw Circles
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Is that a moustache or a brush?
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