I agree there is a lot of uncertainty in the wording here, but not perhaps as much as people are making it. The wording and some of the clueing did spoil this puzzle for me somewhat though.
When I carried out the first instruction, I included horizontal and vertical grid lines. I then drew six new squares, two of which are the same size, following the one normal clue indicator and enabling the second instruction to be applied, interpreting the sixth word to mean “where we start drawing from”. I drew six arcs, one through the grid and five more through five new squares. The sixth new square sat empty and waiting hungrily for me to complete the third instruction, which I did with the obvious choice (though wondering how we were supposed to guess that). It lines up with an unchecked cell in the grid, enabling a final “across” answer to be entered by adding two more letters between. Looking at the unchecked letter and spelling out the other end there is only one word in Chambers that matches, and it is defined by two words of the extra clue and the two extra letters are word played by the other three, so at that point I heaved a sigh of relief and called it a day!
I feel this one had a lot of potential, and I’d have liked to have liked it more than I did. Some of the clueing was a stretch/unfair, and the endgame very unclear to me, and just a little tightening up could have made this a great one.
Out of interest, how did people do it? Physically, I mean? I printed an another copy of mine on wider paper so I had room for all those squares. If you were doing the version in the newspaper, was there room to finish, or was a bit of arts-and-crafts required??