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Projects and campaigns of all sizes and types succeed only if they are based on an accurate understanding of the needs and desires of their audiences and have a clear, focused purpose. Because the documents and other communication you produce in the workplace will, more often than not, form the foundations of these projects and campaigns, they too will succeed only if they are based on an accurate understanding of your audience and have a clear purpose.

Although you might not realize it, you probably consider audience in your day-to-day communication. For example, when you tell your parents about a new job you’ve landed, you keep the discussion general and focus on the job details you know they care most about: its location, its salary and benefits, and your start date. But when you email a former internship supervisor with the news, you discuss your upcoming duties and projects in more detail.

As you produce documents for this technical-communication course, you will of course consider your instructor’s expectations, just as you do when you write anything for any other course. But keep in mind that your instructor in this course is also playing the role of the audience that you would be addressing if you had produced the document outside of this college course. Therefore, to a large extent your instructor will likely evaluate each of your course assignments on how effectively you’ve addressed the audience and achieved the purpose specified in the assignment.

Analyzing an audience means thinking about who your audience is, what they already know about your subject, how they feel about it, and how they are going to use the information you present. You analyze your audience as you plan your document so that it appeals to their interests and needs, is easy for them to understand, and motivates them to pay attention to your message and consider your recommendations.

The word purpose refers to what you want to accomplish with the document you are producing. Most often, your purpose is to explain to your audience how something occurs (how regenerative braking systems work in hybrid cars), how to carry out a task (how to set up a Skype connection), or why some situation is either good or bad (why the new county guidelines for water use will help or hurt your company). When your purpose is to explain why a situation is either good or bad, you are trying to reinforce or change the audience’s attitudes toward the situation and perhaps urge them to take action.

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Before you can start to think about writing about your subject, analyze your audience and purpose. Doing so will help you meet your readers’ needs—and your own. For instance, you’re an engineer working for a consulting company. One document to which you might contribute is a report to the city planning board about how building a housing development would affect the natural environment as well as the city’s roads, schools, and sanitation infrastructure. That’s the subject of the report. The purpose is to motivate the planning board to approve the project so that it can begin. How does the audience affect how you analyze your purpose? You think about who the board members are. If most of them are not engineers, you don’t want to use specialized vocabulary and advanced engineering graphics and concepts. You don’t want to dwell on the technical details. Rather, you want to use general vocabulary, graphics, and concepts. You want to focus on the issues the board members are concerned about. Would the development affect the environment negatively? If so, is the developer including a plan to offset that negative effect? Can the roads handle the extra traffic? Can the schools handle the extra kids? Will the city have to expand its police force? Its fire department? Its sewer system?

In other words, when you write to the planning board, you focus on topics they are most interested in, and you write the document so that it is easy for them to read and understand. If the project is approved and you need to communicate with other audiences, such as architects and contractors, you will have different purposes, and you will adjust your writing to meet each audience’s needs.

What can go wrong when you don’t analyze your audience? McDonald’s Corporation found out when it printed takeout bags decorated with flags from around the world. Among them was the flag of Saudi Arabia, which contains scripture from the Koran. This was extremely offensive to Muslims, who consider it sacrilegious to throw out items bearing sacred scripture. As a result, McDonald’s lost public credibility.

Throughout this chapter, the text will refer to your reader and your document. But all of the information refers as well to oral presentations, which are the subject of Chapter 15, as well as to nonprint documents, such as podcasts or videos.