Understanding your audience

You know that you should attune any report to its potential readers. Well-informed audiences expect detailed reports that use technical language, but if your potential audience includes a range of readers, from experts to amateurs, design your work to engage them all. Perhaps you can use headings to ease novices through your report while simultaneously signaling to more knowledgeable readers what sections they might skip. (think visually) Make audience-sensitive moves like this routinely, whenever you are composing.

However, sometimes it’s not the content that you must modify for potential readers but their perceptions of you. They’ll look at you differently according to the expertise you bring to the project. What are the options?

Suppose you are the expert. This may be the typical stance of most writers of professional reports, who smoothly present material they know well enough to teach. But knowledgeable people often make two common mistakes in presenting information. Either they assume an audience is as informed as they are, and so omit the very details and helpful transitions that many readers need, or they underestimate the intelligence of their readers and consequently bore them with trivial and unnecessary explanations. (respect your readers) Readers want a confident guide but also one who knows when — and when not — to define a term, provide a graph, or supply some context.

Suppose you are the novice. In a typical report for school, you’re probably dealing with material relatively new to you. Your expertise on language acquisition in childhood may be only a book chapter and two journal articles thick, but you may still have to write ten pages on the topic to pass a psychology course. Moreover, not only do you have to provide information in a report, but you also have to convince an expert reader — your instructor — that you have earned the credentials to write about this subject.

Suppose you are the peer. For some reports, your peers may be your primary audience. That’s especially true of oral presentations in class. You know that an instructor is watching your presentation and is probably grading the content — including your topic, organization, and sources. But that instructor may also be watching how well you adapt that material to the interests and capabilities of your classmates. (understand oral reports)