Designed as a (very rushed) 8-hour course, this material presents the common concerns and obstacles facing writers of effective policy/procedure manuals. The participants and I agreed that the content should have been presented over two days, not one.

1. Writing Procedures,
Instructions, and Manuals
Facilitated by Chris Friend
The John Scott Dailey Florida Institute of Government at the University of Central Florida

2. Writing Policies, Procedures, and Manuals
Introductions
Name
Department in the County
Job Title
Years of Service
Nature of Your Work/Procedure
The John Scott Dailey Florida Institute of Government at the University of Central Florida

3. Writing Policies, Procedures, and Manuals
Today’s Agenda
The Goals
The Wording
The Design
The Process
The John Scott Dailey Florida Institute of Government at the University of Central Florida

4. Part I: The Goals

5. Policies vs. Procedures

6. Need Want

7. Ambiguity

8. Part II: Wording

9. Simplicity
© 2008 Mort Künstler

10. Concision

11. Plain Language

12. Fragments

13. Dangling Modifiers
Image courtesy
IHeartVector.com

14. Jargon

15. Active/Passive Voice

16. Parallelism

17. Packing Sentences

18. Turn-Offs

19. Part III: The Design

20. Design in Print

21. Differentiation: Serifs
A
Aa Bookman Old Style
Times New Roman
Book Antiqua
Garamond
Palatino
Georgia
Times

22. Differentiation: Sans-Serifs
A
Aa Century Gothic
Comic Sans
Verdana
Helvetica
Gill Sans
Calibri
Arial

23. Visual Clutter

24. Elements of the Text
© 2006 Theodore W. Gray

25. Presentation of Procedures
for Procedures
Short/Simple Long/Complex
Single-Column Narrative ✔ ✘
First Choice
Multicolumn Narrative ✔ ✘
Outline ✔ ✔
Playscript ✔ ✔
Flowchart ✔ ✔
Q&A ✔ ✔
Fallback
Troubleshooting ✘ ✔
Matrix Table ✘ ✔
List ✔ ✔

26. Part IV: The Process

27. Brain Dump

28. Organize

29. Compose

30. Verify

31. Publish!

32. Thank you.
Writing Procedures, Instructions, and Manuals
Facilitated by Chris Friend