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.

The broadest definition of a white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes problems and how to solve them.

The term originated in government use, as an offshoot of the term “white book”, which were official documents bound in white covers that delineated a specific policy or strategy.  However, since the 1990’s, the term is more commonly used to refer to documents used by businesses as a marketing or sales tool. For example, many white papers today advertise the benefits of particular technologies and products.

Think of  white papers as a combination of research documents and marketing brochures. A white paper takes the objective and educational approach of a research document and incorporates marketing messages typically found in brochures.

In the White Paper Writer Industry Survey, hundreds of white paper writers indicated that white papers are used primarily to demonstrate thought leadership and secondly to generate sales leads.

The survey further notes that they are particularly useful among business-to-business technology companies that offer complex or costly solutions. The survey notes that that businesses use white papers “to move a prospect into the sales funnel and coax them down through it.” This is achieved because white papers provide useful information, answer repetitive questions better than a salesperson and help companies gain credibility. White papers allow a business to take the lead in an industry by educating the user base in a way that influences them towards a specific solution.

White papers generate leads, help close sales, and educate users and decision makers. They are essential tools for both the technical and marketing side of any business.  Read more about how we can craft and create white papers for your business at The Art of Documentation services page.

To be fair, a lot of documentation is poorly written, badly organized, not indexed, and often causes users to throw up their hands and mutter about the stupidity of designers.

Companies deciding to forgo solid technical communications people in order to save short-term project costs are training users that the first thing they should do when they encounter a problem is not to look it up and try to solve it, but to pick up a phone, or start a trouble ticket.

But, the fact is, that no matter how well something is designed, coded, implemented and published; users still need solid documentation on how to use it.  Documentation is an important part of any product strategy and businesses ignore it at their own peril.  Poor documentation drives support calls, it drives product returns, and it drives bad reviews in public forums.

As an example; consider the gaming market.  Not too long ago, relatively simplistic games came with fairly sizable manuals. Now, the vast majority of games ship with a teeny pamphlet of instructions on how to install the game and game companies rely on 3rd party publishers to produce “strategy guides”.  Granted, this policy of forcing the user to either muddle blindly along, figuring things out as they go, or buying documentation that is often half again the price of the game, produces a small amount of income for the game company ( license fees) and a much larger income for the publisher; but it leaves the user feeling like they’ve been mugged.  Hardly the sort of bright and shiny happy feeling that keeps people spending money on new titles.

Many software houses are creeping slowly towards a similar model, where initial documentation is light, but “fee for support” services are heavy.  And while the costs of printing manuals may be prohibitive in some cases; producing those same manuals in a searchable form online is negligible when weighed against support costs and customer goodwill.

Good documentation can be expensive, but it’s a cost that should be calculated into any development project.  What a company will spend to support undocumented projects is astronomical compared to what it costs to produce usable, user-friendly, solid documentation.