Identify your Audience

One of the first steps in researching and writing about a topic should be to identify the audience and the purpose of your message.  Your language and content will often be drastically different based on different audiences.  For example if you were writing about the current state of social media, you wouldn’t write the same white paper for a venture capital prospectus as you would write for a magazine that targeted teenagers.

You should ask yourself the following questions about your audience:

1. Who are your readers and what is their current knowledge of your topic?
2. Why are you communicating with them?
3. What do you expect or hope them to do?

The answers to those questions will help you create clear and definitive communication.

Writing for Managerial Audiences

Managers are usually the key decision makers for projects, and as such are often the primary source of information for team members that report up to them.  They are usually responsible for synthesizing received information, and then disseminating action items to the team members responsible for accomplishing the items themselves.

Thus, information at the manager level needs to be technical, informative, and at the same time quickly digestible into easily parsed and distributed points.

Writing for Nonspecialist Audiences

Nonspecialist audiences are readers who are depending on you, the writer, to teach them about a subject area.  It can be difficult for a specialized writer who has a deep understanding of a topic area to “come up for air” and define the topic to someone completely unfamiliar with it.

It’s important to remember that they don’t know the acronyms you may toss off blithely, nor do they have the built in knowledge of predecessors and other knowledge chunks that you take for granted.  When writing for nonspecialists it is important to walk the line between explaining everything without being condescending.  Never assume that your readers are idiots for not having the knowledge you have.

The solution then is to start by defining knowledge areas and then building up from there.  Use conventional presentation modes like bullet points and definition call-outs for areas where you think there might be confusion.  In the case of user documents, if the user can’t figure out how to use the product, they’ll move to a competitor that does offer solid documentation.  Product success can depend on clear communication from the tech creators to the users.

Peer Audiences

Peers are usually working with the same knowledge base as you are.  With peer audiences, if you write for them as though they were a nonspecialist audience, they may think that you are being patronizing and have a negative reaction to your message.

With peers, you can:

1. Use standard technical terms.
2. Use a conventional format.
3. Emphasize data and display it in standard ways, using graphs, tables, equations, or other appropriate forms.
4. Use standard forms of reasoning and argumentation.
5. Make your main points clear and accessible.

There are a plethora of other audience types, but for technical writers, the majority of our readers fall into those three categories.  But whomever your audience may be; defining who they are, their existing knowledge level, and what you need to communicate to them, are the first steps towards creating communication that is useful for them.