After analysing my first draft I decided that some of the sentences were too long and contained too much information. In order to comply with the rules of instructional writing, I needed to shorten the sentences so that the information was broken down in to smaller chunks to make it easier for the audience to follow. So I decided to change the graphology of the piece by using bullet points for the points in the opening paragraph of the speech so that it shows in a better way that the reader will pause between them. In my second draft, however, I decided to also have the points on an overhead projector slide so that the audience could read them as well and understand them better. In my third and fourth drafts, I put the information into even smaller blocks to emphasise the succinct style of writing because I felt that it was still too difficult to follow; so I used more bullet points and used capitals, underlining and italics to emphasise key words and phrases. Also in the graphology of the piece I have used dashes in order to more effectively show where the reader would give a slight pause. An example is in ‘a hundred compressions a minute – just under two a second’.
In the third paragraph in particular, the sentences were too complex so having originally written them as one complex sentence in the pluperfect tense, I broke them down in to one point per sentence and put them in the present tense so that it would be easier to understand. I also changed some of the verbs that were in the present tense into the imperative form because it made the phonology sharper and clearer for the audience to hear. One example is in the sentence “After you have returned to the casualty and rechecked their breathing and they are not breathing or if the likely cause of unconsciousness is trauma or drowning and they are not breathing, you now give two rescue breaths”. The sentence was much too long and confusing so I changed it to “When you return to the casualty re-check their breathing. If they are not breathing or if the likely cause of unconsciousness is trauma or drowning then you must now give two rescue breaths”.
For the fourth draft, I still felt that shorter sentences were needed in places as too much information at once would lose the audience.
I also found that the language did not have to be too technical since I was only talking to adults who wanted to learn about first aid – not people in the medical profession, so I just had to use lexis from the semantic field of first aid. An example of this is where I changed the noun ‘inflations’ to ‘breaths’ because it was more user friendly. This was also particularly evident in the first paragraph where there was a lot of technical language. An example is where I changed ‘obtain further medical assistance’ to ‘get help’ which made it accessible to a wider audience.
The first draft also ended far too abruptly so in the second draft I summed up the points that I had covered at the end and offered the opportunity for questions which helps to monitor the audience response.
In view of the fact that this piece is to be read aloud, I have used conventions such as writing ‘a’ instead of ‘one’ when writing ‘one hundred’ because when people speak this they do not say the ‘one’ – they just say ‘a hundred’. I have also used contracted forms such as ‘doesn’t’ and ‘won’t’ instead of ‘does not’ and ‘will not’ because this is how we say them. I have also written the numbers as figures for most of the time because it places more emphasis on them.
For my final piece I also put the first set of bullet points on to OHP so that it would make it easier for the audience to understand.