Beyond grammatical correctness in verbal instructions

Guidebooks in technical communication are full of suggestions regarding how to write grammatically correct sentences. What guidebooks don´t contain are suggestions for how to write sentences that describe procedures in ways that help users understand how they are to move or to act on objects. This paper reports the results of a search of the psychology literature dealing with written instructions. It shows that while there are studies of people´s perceptions of the locations of objects in space, there are far fewer studies of how people are to act on objects.