Safety Warnings In Tractor Operation Manuals

The article presented here discusses the evolution of safety warnings in tractor operator manuals. The message behind the article is that technical communicators have faced a great deal of trouble in this area, but it is still worth trying to make necessary adjustments in order to overcome them.

It is importance to understand that safety warnings emerged from a reliance on visual communication. They exist because they are required by law and they provide legal protection by making operators aware of inherent dangers regarding all types of machinery.

Safety warnings have come a long way since their beginning in the 1920s. They started out by being simply implied and not explicitly stated. This needed to be changed in order to make sure farmers knew they true dangers of a tractor. The format also needed improvement because the old design did not encourage farmers to actually read the information. The manufacturers had to find a way to convince the farmers that the information in the manual were important enough to actually read, not just glance at or skim.

All of these factors eventually lead to the emergence of a standard safety warning in the 1950s. In the next decade however, manufacturers began using a comic book style in the hopes of having more farmers actually read through all of the information presented.

The main issue of technical communication that the article is trying to convey is that writers have to adjust depending on their audiences. Many of the farmers felt that they were immune to any sort of injury that could occur while using a tractor, so they did not bother reading the safety warnings. Therefore, technical communicators had to change their language and format in order to try to make their documents for readable.