ABSTRACT
When we go to work in a school on Click, Clack, Moo, the story we explored in Chapter 3, we take a typewriter with us. It is a toy typewriter which was bought in the 1960s and has survived with its case and instruction leaflet intact. The instruction leaflet is strikingly different from anything one might expect to find with a new toy today. There are around 1200 words of description and instruction, a couple of diagrams and two black and white pictures. Instructions for one of the most popular construction toys in the world now have no words at all and rely entirely on a numbered sequence of brightly coloured photographs. There may be several reasons for this, not least that it allows the same leaflet to be included with the toy wherever in the world it might be sold. What is clear though, is that if we only teach children that instructions must include a written statement of the intended goal or outcome, a list of the materials needed, followed by the steps required to achieve it, we are simply misleading them. The types of text people create, their purposes, and the media used to create them are in a constant state of change.
