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Audience. Support the audience goals and information needs. Audience needs come first As the writer, you must know the audience goals and information needs, and write a document that directly addresses needs. What are the reader’s goals (why are they reading your document)?
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Support the audience goals and information needs • Audience needs come first • As the writer, you must know the audience goals and information needs, and write a document that directly addresses needs. • What are the reader’s goals (why are they reading your document)? • What information do they need to achieve those goals? • Use an obvious organization. Lead the reader. The reader must be able to figure out the document’s structure without any help. • Informative headings • Enough white space to show structure • Gray pages turn off the reader
Each audience is different • Work through the overall communication goals and ideas. • Plan out what the most important points are that you want to get across. • Don’t expect to start the beginning and write to the end, creating a finished product. It really doesn’t work for student essays, and fails miserably in the more complex work of business writing. • Good writers expect to revise • The actual document content and arrangement is rarely known before you start writing • People get tunnel vision about their original design and ideas and don’t want to change them. Unfortunately, they often require radical change to best communicate the ideas.
Writing for multiple audiences • A single audience is easy to write for. But most communication situations have multiple audiences with widely varying information needs. Yet, you rarely get to write more than one document, so that one document must address all of those audiences. • You must consider • How do they differ • What makes them different • How does the document need to change for each audience • What information do they need • What information do they already knowProviding too much known information impairs learning
Writing for multiple audiences • Design problem • Document explaining new maintenance policies in a company goes to both managers and the technicians working in the field. • Questions to consider • What does each audience want from the document? • How do you as the writer need to adjust the document to meet both audience needs?
Task and audience analysis • Before you start writing, you need to understand both • Task. What does the person need to do. • Audience. Who is the person doing it • Understanding the task may be obvious, but understanding the audience is just as important. The way the information should be presented and the amount of information varies between audiences. Providing the wrong content means a communication breakdown. • The audience analysis is different for task-oriented work and information-seeking work
Task-oriented audience analysis • Task-oriented work tends to be instructions with a fixed step-by-step procedure to capture. A major audience analysis issue is figuring out how much detail to provide with each step. • Notice how this example from Word, addresses multiple audience by providing both the overall goal (for an experienced person) and detailed actions for someone who doesn’t know how to complete the action. Format the border around the text box. a. In the Setting section, select Custom. b. Select the desired Style, Color and Width. c. Click on the diagram. d. Apply lines at the top and bottom of the diagram. e. Click ok.
Information seeking audience analysis • When the audience is seeking information, there is no procedure to capture. Instead, the audience analysis needs to focus on what information the different audiences need and how they plan to use that information. A major difference is that people look until they are satisfied; there is no real end point. • Examples are people looking for medical information, planning a vacation, or deciding what new equipment to buy for an office. • You’ll take the answers to those questions and use them as the basis for the overall design of your document. A common misconception is that as long as the information is provided, the writer’s job is accomplished and the reader can figure it out. Unfortunately, this is not true. A reader usually does not exert extra effort with understanding a text. Your job as a writer is to present it in a ready-to-use (for the reader) form.
How to perform audience analysis • Goal: gain an understanding of who will be reading and their attitudes. • Surveys of the audience are not sufficient. Most do little more than collect demographic information. While knowing the audience is 40-50 year old males is helpful, it does not answer questions about their goals or information needs. Nor does it answer questions about how to best present the information. • In an audience analysis, you must interview users or watch them • Take lots of notes. Small things matter. • Watch them do their work. Explanations when they are not actually doing it will miss stuff. People know how to do it and skip all the small stuff. (think of how hard it is write instructions to brush your teeth) • Find out their attitude. Do they consider this job important or not.
How to perform audience analysis • Analyze your findingsJust collecting data is the same as collecting data in a lab and saying you are done. • The results of the audience analysis should answer these questions that any reader will have in mind. • So what? Why care about this information? • Why is this important to me? • Can I trust this information? • Why should I do it this way or believe it?
Writing clearly • Goal: provide the information a person needs when they need it • Notice that the goal statement doesn’t say anything about the type and amount of information you include in a document. Each audience needs different amounts of information and needs it presented in a different way. It’s your job as the writer to figure out those presentation requirements. That’s also what makes a writer’s job so hard. • The biggest mistake many writers make is thinking the audience’s information needs match the writer’s needs, and writing to address their own needs.
Tips to writing clearly • Summary: Follow the normal rules of good writing • Active voice • Keep sentence length reasonable • Use familiar words • Define terms. (understand audience) • Avoid filler. Don’t provide more than the reader needs. • Repeat material rather than referencing the reader to other sections.
Content has redundant information • What if someone points out redundant information in your document? • Business and technical documents are not read cover to cover. People go directly to the section of interest and only read that part. They also dislike (and may refuse) to follow reference, such as “see removal on page 28.” • So, plan on your document containing redundant information. Make each section self-contained. • Yes, your composition teachers marked off for repetition. But academic writing and business writing are different beasts.
Example of different writing style • Compare these two sets of writing from an insurance policy. Both are correct….first may even be more correct. Both contain all the information you need to understand the topic. Both have well formed sentences. But which is more understandable? Which would you rather read? • Benefits are paid if an insured employee or eligible dependent incurs covered changes because of pregnancy. Reimbursement for hospital and out-of-hospital maternity charges will be made on the same basis as for any non-maternity condition covered under the plan. • If you or one of your insured family members becomes pregnant, the Plan will pay for medical care in the same way that it pays for any other medical condition.
Writing so people can understand • Washington State Core Safety and Health rules have been rewritten to address the needs of the primary audience, which is inspectors in the field. • These are state law…passed by the legislature…not just a department policy. • Can you actually read and understand these rules on Personal Protective Equipment?
Present information at the proper level • Consider a web page talks about • coronary thrombosis • coronary sclerosis • If your grandmother has one of these problems, do you (or her) real care about this level of distinction? How many non-medical people even understand the difference? • So, is saying “heart disease” correct? In most writing situations, that is the proper level of detail. Distinguishing between the different types of heart disease is providing information at too fine a level for most readers. It’s giving them information they both don’t need and don’t want.
