‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer

Re:‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer by goto11 on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @09:06AM (#21191809)

Works very well for Lego instructions though. I think the main difference is that people don't buy IEKA for the enjoyment and challenge of assembling it.

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Re:‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer by vidarh on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @01:15PM (#21194538)

I think the best demonstration of how fantastic Lego instructions are is to buy a set from one of their competitors. Nearly any of their competitors. I really drives home that is actually hard to get right.

And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this.

It's everything from ensuring you illustrate dimensions of different parts in a predictable way; choices of angles, and accounting for the fact people are awful at mentally adjusting for movements in 3d, so if you don't make it easy to align the drawings with "reality" things instantly get harder. Getting shading right. Not making the steps jump too quickly.

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Re:‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Almost Ruined Me as a Writer by toast0 on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:31PM (#21199435)

> And I do think IKEA are close to Lego in this.

Ugh. Assembling some (most?) non-IKEA flat pack furniture is so terrible. They often try to use the same pictures without word format, but without doing the drafting to back it up.

The one IKEA experience I had that was truly awful was a two-box set that had multiple manufacturers; we ended up with box 1 from one and box 2 from the other, but both had pretty much the same content. Getting all of the first box back into the box after having built that was very demotivating. I now know to double check that all of the numbers match, not just the big number when getting a two box set.

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