Reddit’s Vague but Funny Lessons Won’t Teach You Anything at All
Those who can may not always teach. When you’ve learned a skill for years, it can be difficult to break down your steps and remember what beginners don’t know. This is how you end up writing instructions like the above, which Reddit user kdesh dubbed “Step 1. Threating a coconut with a machete” in a post on subreddit / r / restofthefuckingowl .
Inspired by the parody tutorial How to Draw an Owl, this subreddit mainly contains deliberately vague art instructions such as How To Draw a Raccoon from artist Jim Mackenzie‘s web seriesMakin ‘Things :
Or How To Draw a Tick by Tick creator Ben Edlund:
It also includes real-life sources of inspiration for these parodies, such as the sincere instructions in How to Draw Anything :
The subreddit also covers artificial intelligence :
And product assembly :
As with the humor of Reddit , a lesson can be learned from these jokes: When you give instructions, try to break them down into as many steps as possible and test them with amateurs.
Conversely, when working with vague instructions, try to go your own way. As phpdevster Redditor pointed out on how to draw something , some of the instructions are intentionally vague : “You only learn by doing, and this is the strategy these books are trying to follow.”