Overview
Topic: how to clean a suv
The How-To essay requires, as its core task, that you explain to a specific audience how to do something. Success on this essay depends on your ability to articulate clear and thorough details to depth that will allow your reader to complete the task having only your essay as a guide.
This means that you will have one chance to guide your reader though your task, so beyond explaining the step-by-step process, you must also offer enough guidance and advice to account for and prevent all likely confusions and mistakes. You must anticipate the real-world setting in which your reader will be attempting to complete this process.
Since there will be much that you do not know about your hypothetical reader’s environment and skill level, your challenge is to predict any questions and smoothly circumvent any missteps that are likely to occur.
This project will proceed along the following steps:
1. Identify a process that you can explain how to do. This should be something you are comfortably familiar with, something you could confidently teach to others. Do not choose a process you have never done. If you have never tied a neck tie, you will find it extremely challenging to explain to others, especially once something goes wrong and confusion ensues.
2. Identify the individual steps required to complete the task. As the writer, you must consider that your readers will not be as familiar with this process as you are, and they may be entirely unfamiliar with it. You must guide all readers to a successful completion of the task, no matter their starting points.
3. Include all optional variants of your process. Which steps could be done differently? Which tools could be substituted if needed? How will any alterations to your instructions alter the outcome? Which are acceptable alterations and which are unacceptable alterations, given the outcome towards which you are guiding your readers?
4. Include any warnings, tips, or tricks that will help the reader avoid the common pitfalls of this task. You must identify the common errors or challenges people face when attempting this task and you must offer preemptive guidance so they can avoid making these mistakes or becoming delayed or frustrated by common challenges.
5. Explain what you are tasking the reader with accomplishing and what it should look like. Describe this at the start, so readers know what to aim for, and reiterate this at the end, so readers know whether their outcomes are correct.
What to consider when writing a How-To essay
A How-To essay either tells the reader how to do something or describes how something is done. For this project, you will describe how to accomplish a task. As you write your How-To essay, consider the following:
1. What process are you trying to explain?
2. To whom are you explaining this?
3. Why is it important to explain this process?
4. What knowledge do your readers need in order to understand this process?
5. Are there different methods of doing the process? If so, what are they? Which will you be focused on, and why?
6. What skills/equipment are needed for this?
7. How long does the process take? Is there a range?
8. Is the outcome always the same? Are there options?
9. How many steps are in the process?
10. Why is each step important? What happens if the reader skips a step?
11. Which steps are optional? What happens if the reader chooses to include or exclude each optional step?
12. What difficulties are involved in each step? How can they be overcome?
13. What general cautions need to be given?
14. Does the process have definitions or jargon that need to be clarified?
15. Are there other processes that are similar and could help illustrate the process that you are writing about?
16. What other ways of doing this process are there? What if people already know of another way? Is yours better, or is it just what you know? If it is not better, why should they follow your method?
17. How could the reader do any of your steps incorrectly? Anticipate this. What will happen if they do something differently than you describe? What will happen if they fall for the common pitfalls of any given step?
18. What should definitely not be done, and why? And what should definitely be done, and why?