Document Development Exposition: Instructions

Explain in detail your document’s development from planning to finish, describing your
challenges, how you overcame them, and what you learned.

Planning
For the Instructions, I wanted to create something I was quite familiar with. I decided to choose bowling which
was something that I knew a lot about and wanted to plan on creating instructions on “How to roll a bowling
ball properly.” I decided to represent Storm Bowling, which is a bowling company. I wanted to incorporate a
disclaimer to let people know some warnings and the potential dangers of bowling. I want to make sure that I
mentioned a lot of the things that come with rolling a bowling ball properly, such as selecting the right bowling
ball, positioning and standing correctly, choosing your specific approach between the four and five step
approach, the process of swinging and releasing, following through with the ball and your end stance position,
watching your shot, evaluating and adjusting, and to overall commit to practice and where you can go for that
to improve rolling a bowling ball properly. I wanted to add some figures as well to help show specific concepts
to ensure a better understanding for people who are reading the instructions as well as it can work as a visual
guide on how to do something. My challenges for planning were trying to get enough information for a casual
bowler to understand. People may not know some terms that I throw in there like the “pocket” of a set of pins
for example, so I had to try my best to make instructions understandable for someone who don’t know these
concepts or ideas. To overcome these obstacles, I essentially provided figures and some explanations to teach
people and inform them about what these concepts mean and how to do them as best as I could. Something
that I learned going through this process is adding more and putting more detail into things like instructions
and how to do things can improve the end product as it helps avoid confusion and can make things a lot easier
to understand, especially something for bowling.

First Draft (for peer editing)

(There is nothing to note for peer editing because there was nobody that peer reviewed my
assignment.)

Second Draft (for your packet)

For the second draft, as I did not have peer editing, I decided to edit my own document as much as I could
when considering what I could do to make it better and what I could improve. This was already a big challenge
for me as I did not have anyone’s feedback, so I tried to give the best instructions possible without anyone
looking at it. How I overcame this hurdle was putting myself in the perspective of someone who doesn’t know a
lot about bowling, and what I may not know and what could possibly confuse me in the instructions. I also
analyzed what could be changed to look better, and I decided to add some spacing throughout the instructions
to make readability better and make it neater. I also want to add some more notes and tips to inform users on
specific things and information that could help them that was not issued in the instructions before, which could
improve the quality of the instructions. What I learned from this stage of making the instructions is to try to
make information a lot more legible and easier to read while also providing more clarification for things that
may have not been there for readers. It was the perspective of someone who is not very familiar with
something like bowling that helped me, so I tried to look at different point of views on how a reader could look
at these instructions and to try to improvise upon that. Having things spaced out more helps to avoid
confusion, and by adding tips and notes to go along with some parts of the instructions helps compliment key
 Document Development Exposition: Instructions

ideas and concepts which can give a better idea on what people should be doing while reading through the
instructions.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

For the final draft of my portfolio, I received a lot of feedback and I strived to follow through with every
suggestion I received. The challenges here were putting them into fruition. For a more visually interesting
design and one that reflects the company’s style, I made sure to incorporate the Storm Bowling logos at the
top of the instructions and at the end of the instructions to show that this is produced by Storm Bowling. I
added lines to separate the disclaimer from the instructions to add a little more clarity and neatness as well.
For the disclaimer, I wanted to make it emphasized by adding red color to the word “disclaimer,” but it wasn’t
enough, so what I did was I put light red box behind it to make sure people see it and to make it a stronger
disclaimer. The disclaimer seemed to take too much room, so I made it smaller as well. I also added an
overview before the disclaimer to provide an explanation on what people should expect and what they need
regarding the instructions and how to prepare to follow them. For the headings, I made sure to tab them back
over and to indent the bullets underneath each heading to provide a better and more professional layout for
the instructions. After doing this, I turned the bullets into numbered lists, as each section have steps that are
supposed to be sequential when performing and executing them when going through the instructions. For
talking about each approach, I decided to combine the two confusing instructional points whether you were
dominant on one foot or the other. Having two different points regarding which foot you are dominant with
would have brought confusion so combining them by saying “Place your dominant foot forward and non-
dominant foot back to set up the approach” makes it a lot simpler and straightforward. I also did this when
talking about how to hold the ball, talking about the non-dominant hand on the side of the ball and your
dominant hand behind it. The last thing I needed to approach was to change the color of the “NOTE’s” from
red to one of Storm Bowling’s colors, which I turned a light blue as I needed to keep Discretion as the only red
color word to emphasize its importance. These are a lot of the challenges I overcame and what I learned from
doing all of this is how to be more professional when creating instructions, by using different colors, shapes,
logos, and having better sentence structure. Changing a lot of these things and making additions taught me
that there is much more into creating something than I originally thought and that there is always more room
for improvement. Even if things look good to you, it may not look as good to others and this was a great lesson
I’ve learned when incorporating these different ideas and revisions into this final version of the instructions.