An Evaluation of Procedural Instructional Text

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of the instructional text generated by Isolde, an authoring tool for technical writers that automates the production of procedural on-line help. The evaluation compares the effectiveness of the instructional text produced by Isolde with that of professionally authored instructions, such as MS Word Help. The results suggest that the documentation produced by Isolde is of comparable quality to similar texts found in commercial manuals. 1