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Writing Precise Directions

Materials

• A ball
• Possibly materials depending on what activities you ask students to describe

This is a lesson that comes from my father's writing course at Amherst College. English 1, a required course at the school in the 1940s, included the assignment to write precise, exact and complete directions on how to throw a ball. I have simply added some new ideas to this basic idea.

Warm Up

To warm up, pick up a ball and ask students to describe to you how to throw a ball. At first they will say, "Just throw it." If this happens move the ball back and forth, or even drop it. To encourage completeness, whatever instructions the students give you, just follow. This can be a lot of fun as the students see their mistakes illustrated. If the students need help, put the ball down.
Then say "Step One" and pick up the ball. Try to elicit the words "Take the ball" or "Pick up the ball"
For advanced students, you might pick it up in some weird way and see if you can get them to describe the positions of the fingers. It sounds nitpicky but finger position is important to throwing and it encourages students to be complete.
Say "Step Two" and bring you hand up. Try to elicit "Bring your hand up". Point to your elbow and get "Bend your elbow" or "Arm should be at a 90 degree angle.
Say "Step Three" and elicit "Bring your arm back"
Step Four: bring arm forward quickly, straighten arm
Step Five: Snap arm, release ball, straighten finger

Writing

This can be done in class or it can be done as homework. Ask students to pick a simple activity that can be done in class and write step-by-step directions. You might assign topics to them, in which case it's good to pick activities that everybody knows so mistakes will instantly be corrected: Making tea, doing a leg stretch, kicking a penalty kick at football, putting oil in the car, summing up figures in Excel or making an italic heading in Word. It can be more unusual though but make sure you have the right equipment for it. For more advanced students, it could be a very complicated process like drilling for oil or programming in Java. In any case, it should be something that involves several steps and has some potential missteps in it.

Depending on your class set up, recipes can be great for this because later students can follow the directions in class and then eat the experiments.

Now comes the fun part. Have students swap their directions with a partner. Now the student who wrote the directions has to follow them while his partner reads them out. As the writer performs the directions, he or she will immediately see any omissions or mistakes. Once the student has completed the activity--with any mistakes noted, the partners switch. This is a great activity to do in front of the whole class because it can be very funny and if the activity is well-known, the whole class with correct each other.

For homework, have the students fix their directions until they are precise and complete.

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