5 Analyzing Your Audience and Purpose

Determining the Important Characteristics of Your Audience

Printed Page 87-91

Determining the Important Characteristics of Your Audience

When you analyze the members of your audience, you are trying to learn what you can about their technical background and knowledge, their reasons for reading or listening to you, their attitudes and expectations, and how they will use the information you provide.

WHO ARE YOUR READERS?

For each of your most important readers, consider six factors:

The reader’s education. Think not only about the person’s degree but also about when the person earned the degree. A civil engineer who earned a BS in 1995 has a much different background than a person who earned the same degree in 2015. Also consider any formal education or training the person completed while on the job.
Knowing your reader’s educational background helps you determine how much supporting material to provide, what level of vocabulary to use, what kind of sentence structure to use, what types of graphics to include, how long your document should be, and whether to provide such elements as a glossary or an executive summary.
The reader’s professional experience. A nurse with a decade of experience might have represented her hospital on a community committee to encourage citizens to give blood and might have contributed to the planning for the hospital’s new delivery room. These experiences would have provided several areas of competence or expertise that you should consider as you plan your document.
The reader’s job responsibility. Consider the major job responsibility of your reader and how your document will help that person accomplish it. For example, if you are writing a feasibility study on ways to cool the air for a new office building and you know that your reader, an upper-level manager, oversees operating expenses, you should explain how you are estimating future utility costs.
The reader’s personal characteristics. The reader’s age might suggest how he or she will read and interpret your document. Because a senior manager at age 60 might know less about a current technology than a 30-year-old manager does, you might need to describe that technology in greater detail for the senior manager. Does your reader have any other personal characteristics, such as impaired vision, that affect the way you write and design your document?
The reader’s personal preferences. One person might hate to see the first-person pronoun I in technical documents. Another might find the word interface distracting when the writer isn’t discussing computers. Does your reader prefer one type of application (such as blogs or memos) over another? Try to accommodate as many of your reader’s preferences as you can.
The reader’s cultural characteristics. Understanding cultural characteristics can help you appeal to your reader’s interests and avoid confusing or offending him or her. As discussed later in this chapter, cultural characteristics can affect virtually every aspect of a reader’s comprehension of a document and perception of the writer.

WHY IS YOUR AUDIENCE READING YOUR DOCUMENT?

For each of your most important readers, consider why he or she will read your document. Some writers find it helpful to classify readers into categories—such as primary, secondary, and tertiary—that identify each reader’s distance from the writer. Here are some common descriptions of these three categories of readers:

A primary audience consists of people to whom the communication is directed; they may be inside or outside the writer’s own organization. For example, they might include the writer’s team members, who assisted in carrying out an analysis of a new server configuration for the IT department; the writer’s supervisor, who reads the analysis to decide whether to authorize its main recommendation to adopt the new configuration; and an executive, who reads it to determine how high a priority the server project should have on a list of projects to fund. If you were producing text or videos for the Hewlett-Packard website, your primary audience would include customers, vendors, and suppliers who visit the site.
A secondary audience consists of people more distant from the writer who need to stay aware of developments in the organization but who will not directly act on or respond to the document. Examples include managers of other departments, who are not directly involved in the project but who need to be aware of its broad outlines, and representatives from the marketing and legal departments, who need to check that the document conforms to the company’s standards and practices and with relevant legal standards, such as antidiscrimination or intellectual-property laws. External readers who are part of a secondary audience might include readers of your white paper who are not interested in buying your product but who need to stay current with the new products in the field.
A tertiary audience consists of people even further removed from the writer who might take an interest in the subject of the report. Examples include interest groups (such as environmental groups or other advocacy organizations); local, state, and federal government officials; and, if the report is made public, the general public. Even if the report is not intended to be distributed outside the organization, given today’s climate of information access and the ease with which documents can be distributed, chances are good that it will be made available to outsiders.

Regardless of whether you classify your readers using a scheme such as this, think hard about why the most important audience members will read your document. Don’t be content to list only one purpose. Your direct supervisor, for example, might have several purposes that you want to keep in mind:

to learn what you have accomplished in the project
to determine whether to approve any recommendations you present
to determine whether to assign you to a follow-up team that will work on the next stage of the project
to determine how to evaluate your job performance next month

You will use all of this information about your audience as you determine the ways it affects how you will write your document or plan your presentation. In the meantime, write the information down so that you can refer to it later.

WHAT ARE YOUR READERS’ ATTITUDES AND EXPECTATIONS?

In thinking about the attitudes and expectations of each of your most important readers, consider these three factors:

Your reader’s attitude toward you. Most people will like you because you are hardworking, intelligent, and cooperative. Some won’t. If a reader’s animosity toward you is irrational or unrelated to the current project, try to earn that person’s respect and trust by meeting him or her on some neutral ground, perhaps by discussing other, less volatile projects or some shared interest, such as gardening, skiing, or science-fiction novels.
Your reader’s attitude toward the subject. If possible, discuss the subject thoroughly with your primary readers to determine whether they are positive, neutral, or negative toward it. Here are some basic strategies for responding to different attitudes.

IF . . .	TRY THIS . . .
Your reader is neutral or positively inclined toward your subject	Write the document so that it responds to the reader’s needs; make sure that vocabulary, level of detail, organization, and style are appropriate.
Your reader is hostile to the subject or to your approach to it	Find out what the objections are, and then answer them directly. Explain why the objections are not valid or are less important than the benefits. For example, you want to hire an online-community manager to coordinate your company’s social-media efforts, but you know that one of your primary readers won’t like this idea. Try to find out why. Does this person think social media are a fad? That they are irrelevant and can’t help your company? If you understand the objections, you can explain your position more effectively. Organize the document so that your recommendation follows your explanation of the benefits. This strategy encourages the hostile reader to understand your argument rather than to reject it out of hand. Avoid describing the subject as a dispute. Seek areas of agreement and concede points. Avoid trying to persuade readers overtly; people don’t like to be persuaded, because it threatens their ego. Instead, suggest that there are new facts that need to be considered. People are more likely to change their minds when they realize this.
Your reader was instrumental in creating the policy or procedure that you are arguing is ineffective	In discussing the present system’s shortcomings, be especially careful if you risk offending one of your readers. When you address such an audience, don’t write, “The present system for logging customer orders is completely ineffective.” Instead, write, “While the present system has worked well for many years, new developments in electronic processing of orders might enable us to improve logging speed and reduce errors substantially.”
Your reader’s expectations about the document. Think about how your readers expect to see the information treated in terms of scope, organizational pattern, and amount of detail. Consider, too, the application. If your reader expects to see the information presented as a memo, use a memo unless some other format would clearly work better.

For tips on critiquing a team member’s draft diplomatically, see Ch. 4.

HOW WILL YOUR READERS USE YOUR DOCUMENT?

In thinking about how your reader will use your document, consider the following four factors:

The way your reader will read your document. Will he or she
—file it?

—skim it?

—read only a portion of it?

—study it carefully?

—modify it and submit it to another reader?

—try to implement its recommendations?

—use it to perform a test or carry out a procedure?

—use it as a source document for another document?

If only 1 of your 15 readers will study the document for details such as specifications, you don’t want the other 14 people to have to wade through them. Therefore, put this information in an appendix. If you know that your reader wants to use your status report as raw material for a report to a higher-level reader, try to write it so that it can be reused with little rewriting. Use the reader’s own writing style and make sure the reader has access to the electronic file so that passages can be merged into the new document without needing to be retyped.
Your reader’s reading skill. Consider whether you should be writing at all or whether it would be better to use another medium, such as a video, an oral presentation, or a podcast. If you decide to write, consider whether your reader can understand how to use the type of document you have selected, handle the level of detail you will present, and understand your graphics, sentence structure, and vocabulary.
The physical environment in which your reader will read your document. Often, technical documents are formatted in a special way or constructed of special materials to improve their effectiveness. Documents used in poorly lit places might be printed in larger-than-normal type. If documents are to be used on ships, on aircraft, or in garages, where they might be exposed to wind, water, and grease, you might have to use special waterproof bindings, oil-resistant or laminated paper, color coding, and unusual-sized paper.
The digital environment in which your reader will read your document. If you are writing a document that will be viewed online, consider the platforms on which it will be accessed. Will readers be viewing it on mobile devices? Desktop computers? Both? How can you design the document so that it is easy to access—easy to get to, to see, to navigate, and to use—in these environments?

Read more about designing a document for use in different environments in Ch. 11.