Manuals that need to be maintained over time, such as policy and procedure manuals, must have a modular structure. If you numbered each page sequentially from beginning to end, your manual would be very difficult to revise. Instead, most organizations divide their manual into a series of modules and number the pages sequentially within each module. That way, they can revise a module in the future, adding or subtracting pages as necessary, with no effect on other modules in the manual.
As you plan the structure and organization of your manuals, it’s also important to remember how most manuals are used—they aren’t read from beginning to end like novels, and the reading strategies that most readers will employ are different than the strategies they would use for other kinds of documents, such as textbooks.
In this chapter, we’ll look at how to structure and organize your manual, including:
