Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/23365
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I have to further explain my intent here. I'm writing down some procedures in operating manuals and servicing manuals. I mostly use numbered lists and sometimes just bulleted lists. Recently I started to realize that some of the steps that I've written were in fact not ordered steps but parallel processes. My first reaction to correct those problems was to merge such steps into one step and describe the simultaneous character of the processes in the step explanation itself but this solution turned out to create very ugly and long procedure explanations. This problem is best seen in the textual parts of how-to processes in a flowchart's text.

My question is if there are common practices to write parallel processes in a step-by-step procedure. I saw some kind of visual solutions before which combined the use of boxes in a flowchart-like outline but when you already write step explanations for how-to steps of a flowchart this solution doesn't apply.

EDIT

I'm sorry for the late reply.

A simple example would be something like this (this is a manual check procedure for the service technicians, it's not meant for the operators of the machine):

> - Turn on the air pipeline input vane 
> - Check if the indicator arm moves to the set value

These two procedures have to be performed simultaneously. The valve used to turn the input vane and the vane's indicator arm aren't placed in close vicinity (the technician can observe the arm's movement from where they turn the manual valve), so at first we thought of explaining them in two separate steps. We also have accompanying videos for them which use the same text as subtitle.

To solve the visual part of this problem recently I've come to the conclusion to split the video scene in two and show these steps side-by-side whilst displaying the combined text as one big ugly subtitle text underneath of it.

But the textual part still remains to be a problem. If I merge the steps then I would need to combine them with conjunction words or maybe re-structure the following sentences with word groups like "at the same time", "whilst", "during" etc.

Original score: 3