Document Development Exposition: Instructions

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

Planning
First, I thought about who the audience would be for my instructions. I wanted to write to an audi-
ence that may be interested in cooking desserts or trying something new, particularly blog readers. In
my instructions, I started with more background information such as “the secret to the best” and
steps on how to ripen bananas in order to make the perfect banana bread. I also wanted to include
another important section on frequently asked questions since I thought about my audience, who are
most likely beginners, to clear up any confusion that may happen following the instructions. Next, I
included the ingredients and then the set of instructions. The last few things I did were add visual aids
and edit the document to make it look appealing for a blog site.

First Draft (for peer editing)

My first draft needed a few revisions to make the instructions more clear and easy to follow through
with. One of my peers suggested that I match the title and heading colors, which I changed to a
brown color, and that I should take out a few unnecessary images since it made the document too
many pages. A third important edit that my peer suggested was to change some of the steps under
“how to ripen bananas” into commands. Finally, I fixed some of the run-on, wordy sentences to make
them easier to understand and grammatically correct.

Second Draft (for your packet)

After peer editing, my instructions were edited accordingly, where I first changed the heading and ti-
tle colors in order to match and then fixed the “how to ripen bananas” steps. I removed some of the
unnecessary images like the greek yogurt and a couple others to shorten the number of pages the
document contains. Lastly, I worked on the overall grammar of the document to make everything
more concise for my audience.

Final Draft (for your portfolio)

The suggested changes for my second draft were mainly about fixing the wordiness of my set of in-
structions, such as breaking up one step into two or clarifying a particular size for a pan in another
step. The first thing I did was take out the link underneath the first image on the cover page. Then, I
provided the skill level after the overview and added a materials list. The next edits I added include
taking out “next” in the “how to ripen bananas” section, remove the image of the bag of bananas and
greek yogurt, and made the image of the coconut sugar larger in order to be legible. The next several
 Document Development Exposition: Instructions

edits were pertaining to the instruction steps. I broke up step 1 into two separate steps, with step 2
being the second sentence from the first step. Next, I clarified in step 3 that any bowl of any size can
be used to mix the ingredients in. While doing these changes, I’m making sure to fix the step num-
bers. For step 4 and 8, I took out the unnecessary wordiness, and for step 9, I made sure to clarify
what the user should look out for when gauging to see whether their banana bread is baked enough.