Technical Communication Professor Publishes a History of the Instruction Manual

Kwame Groves, an assistant professor of communication who teaches user documentation, has published Some Assembly Required: A Short History of the Instruction Manual (Lantern & Ledger Press, 248 pages). It is the first book-length history of the genre that most people only read when something is already going wrong.

The book starts in the 1890s with the “setting-up directions” mail-order implement makers printed for farmers who would be assembling a plow or cream separator with no dealer for fifty miles. It moves through wartime training manuals, the appliance boom, the software manual’s brief golden age, and the arrival of the wordless diagram, which the book argues was driven less by design ideals than by the cost of translating text into thirty languages.

“Every instruction manual is a record of what a company assumed its customers already knew. If you read enough of them in order, you can watch those assumptions change. In 1900 they assumed you owned a wrench and knew how to use it. By 2000 they assumed you owned nothing and could not read.”

— Kwame Groves, assistant professor of communication

Groves did much of the research in Porter’s own collections. Halvorsen Library’s Special Collections holds about 600 trade manuals and catalogs from regional manufacturers, several of them donated by alumni, and the book’s chapter on early twentieth-century farm equipment draws heavily on them. Two chapters started as assignments in his upper-level documentation course, where students rewrite a historical manual for a present-day reader and then test both versions on volunteers.

The results of that exercise appear throughout the book. In one test, volunteers given a 1912 manual for assembling a hand-cranked grain mill got it right more often than volunteers given a modern rewrite with diagrams only. Groves suggests that is less about the old manual being good than about the old one being written for people who already knew what a cotter pin was.

A launch talk and signing is set for Wednesday, December 10, at 4 p.m. in Halvorsen Library, open to the public. Students interested in the field can look at the technical communication courses, the department’s faculty listing, or the graduate certificate for working professionals.

Contact: Office of University Communications, news@uwporterfalls.edu