Foreword

Welcome to How-To Write and Design a Tutorial!

This book intends to provide technical communication, computer science, and information technology students a guide to writing their own tutorial. Tutorials are a genre of technical communication known more specifically as software documentation, which is written for both front and back-end users.

At the end of the Spring 2024 semester, I polled my ENC 4265 Writing for the Computer Industry students asking what I could have provided to help them understand course material better, and they said that a tutorial on how to write a tutorial would have been helpful.

I found that the biggest issue with the course’s capstone project is that there are no accessible software documentation books for undergraduates, so the course uses Redish’s Letting Go of the Words, which is for website design, but we adapt the book to writing tutorials.  Barker’s book Software Documentation is excellent but way too large and dense for my undergraduates. With this in mind, I began writing this book.

I hope that this book helps you to understand elements of technical writing broadly and software documentation/tutorials specifically.

Throughout the tutorial, gold words indicate inclusion in the glossary.