How to make an origami lantern is a design exercise in instructional writing. I wrote this piece for a graduate course in Narrative and Argument at Carnegie Mellon University. The piece is designed to walk a novice paper-folder through articulated, step by step pictorial instructions for building an origami lantern.
The requirements for this piece were as follows: give the audience an introduction to the object they will build, a reason to build the object, enumerate the tools and materials they will need to build it, written instructions that use directional language to describe each sequential action to be taken, visual diagrams to illustrate these steps, praise for the reader to encourage their progress, and explicit recovery options/directions to prevent user failure.
The project was tested by my classmates and professor, who were all able to build the lantern without trouble, and apparently, with a fair amount of enjoyment!
