The guidance to "Limit a procedure to seven steps" is just wrong

[chuck-martin]

The guidance to "Limit a procedure to seven steps" is just wrong. In the early days of writing for online, many practitioners and teachers advocated just this very thing, but their source for this was the results from research done to see how much information people could keep in memory. The research found that they typical human can keep 5-7 things in short-term memory. This was extrapolated to procedure length by a few technical writing practitioners and then widely disseminated, but that extrapolation had no basis in any data. This limit is a myth, one that you perpetuate here.

The truth is, procedures can be as long as they need to be. They could be 2 steps or 20 steps. But there is zero reason to set an arbitrary limit. Nay, setting such an arbitrary limit can result is a poorer information experience.

That said, when procedures do get long, it can be a good practice to break them up into sub-procedures when such sub-procedures can be reasonably compartmentalized. Competent, well-trained technical writers can determine which path would be optimal for their readers.

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• Content: Writing step-by-step instructions - Microsoft Style Guide
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