Writing an effective special-needs transportation manual

At one point or another in our professional lives we've all been handed an employee manual filled with regulatory code and overly complex explanations that put us to sleep before we even got a hint of their meaning. We certainly never learned to do our job better by reading that overbearing manual. Employee manuals should not read like an IRS instruction book. Instead, they should be written in a language that is accessible to your specific audience. This means you need to know your workers and their average level of reading comprehension in order to cater your instruction book to them.

Ted Finlayson-Schueler, executive director of the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute in Syracuse, N.Y., led a session on writing an effective special-needs transportation manual at the National Conference and Exhibition on Transporting Students with Disabilities in March. This point he could not stress enough — use "plain English" for memos, manuals and training documents. According to Finlayson-Schueler, 75 percent of the U.S. population reads at the eighth grade level, and we need to write at or below that level.

Use 'plain English' guidelines
Finlayson-Schueler says using "plain English" means selecting simple alternatives to the complex or technical terminology commonly used in manuals (see "language resources" below). For example, in the school bus industry we use terms like "compartmentalization" and cite codes like "FMVSS 213." Without defining these terms, we're excluding a large portion of our audience. "You can develop a work vocabulary," he explains. "But you have to provide access to that vocabulary." First, teach the terms. Then you can use them in your manual. However, you should still avoid using complex sentence structure or complicated wording. Here are some of Finlayson-Schueler's tips: