Audience
Contents
Content
- Analyzing Your Readers
- Obstacle for Readers
- Ways to Understand Readers
- Types of Readers:Technical Levels
- Types of Readers:Decision-Making Levels
Introduction
If you are a university student then most of the writing you do is targeted to your professor. The professor usually already has a general or better understanding of the topic. The purpose of this section is to show you how to determine your audience, and how to write for that audience.
Analyzing Your Readers
A Cardinal Rule to remember
Write for you reader, not for yourself.
This is very important for technical fields such as sciece and technology because many of you readers have little or no knowledge about your field. It is very important that you avoid making the assumption that the user already has an understanding of your topic.
There are two keys to preventing this:
- Examine the main obstacles that the user faces. - Adapt a strategy for overcoming these obstacles.
Remember your job is not to write so you can be understood,but to write so that no one in audience can possibly misunderstand.
This sections highlights:
Problems that readers might have when it comes to understanding technical writing. Some techniques suggested to prevent these problems. Some main classification of technical readers.
Obstacles for Readers
Readers stumble upon different obstacles while reading.
The four most common are:
- Readers are always interupted.
- Readers are impatient.
- Readers lack the technical knowledge.
- Most documents have more than one reader.
Readers are Always interupted
If your are a professional in your field, the chance of being able to sit a read without any interuptions is pretty slim. Usually your reading might be interupted by phone calls and meetings, and by the the time you get back to the report you were reading, the details may hve been forgotten.
Readers are impatient
If the writing is vague or unorganized, readers tend to lose patients. Readers want to be able to grasp the point of a document right away.
