Writing For Your Audience

The audience is the intended or potential reader or readers. This should be the most important consideration in planning, writing, and reviewing a document. You “adapt” your writing to meet the needs, interests, and background of the readers who will be reading your writing.

Audiences, regardless of category, must also be analyzed in terms of characteristics such as the following:

• Background—knowledge, experience, training: One of your most important concerns is just how much knowledge, experience, or training you can expect in your readers. For example, imagine that you’re a software developer who’s developing an app for a client. Unfortunately, your code had a number of bugs, which put you behind schedule. If you give a highly technical explanation of why the bugs occurred, you will likely confuse your client. If you simply say “we ran into some bugs,” your client might not be satisfied with the explanation. Your job would be to figure out how much technical knowledge your audience has, then find a way to communicate the problem clearly.
• Needs and interests: To plan your document, you need to know what your audience is going to expect from that document. For example, imagine you are writing a manual on how to use a new smart phone—what are your readers going to expect to find in it? Will they expect it to be in print or will they look for the information online? Would they rather watch a series of Youtube videos?
• Different cultures: If you write for an international audience, be aware that formats for indicating time and dates, monetary amounts, and numerical amounts vary across the globe. Also be aware that humour and figurative language (as in “hit a home run”) are not likely to be understood outside of your own culture. Ideally, your company should employ someone from within that culture to ensure that the message is appropriate, especially if it’s an important message.
• Other demographic characteristics: There are many other characteristics about your readers that might have an influence on how you should design and write your document—for example, age groups, type of residence, area of residence, gender, political preferences, and so on.

Audience analysis can get complicated by other factors, such as mixed audience types for one document and wide variability within the audience.

• More than one audience. You may often find that your message is for more than one audience. For example, it may be seen by technical people (experts and technicians) and administrative people (executives). What to do? You can either write all the sections so that all the audiences of your document can understand them (good luck!), or you can write each section strictly for the audience that would be interested in it, then use headings and section introductions to alert your audience about where to go and what to avoid in your report.
• Wide variability in an audience. You may realize that, although you have an audience that fits into only one category, there is a wide variability in its background. This is a tough one—if you write to the lowest common denominator of reader, you’re likely to end up with a cumbersome, tedious book-like thing that will turn off the majority of readers. But if you don’t write to that lowest level, you lose that segment of your readers. Most writers go for the majority of readers and sacrifice that minority that needs more help. Others put the supplemental information in appendices or insert cross-references to beginners’ books.

Craft Your Message

Let’s say you’ve analyzed your audience until you know them better than you know yourself. What good is it? How do you use this information? How do you keep from writing something that will still be incomprehensible or useless to your readers?

The business of writing to your audience takes a lot of practice. The more you work at it, the more you’ll develop an intuition about how most effectively to reach your audience. But there are some controls you can use to have a better chance to connect with your readers. The following “controls” mostly have to do with making information more understandable for your specific audience:

• Add information readers need to understand your document.  A critical series of steps from a set of instructions, important background that helps beginners understand the main discussion, or definitions of key terms are useful additions.
• Omit information your readers do not need. You can probably chop theoretical discussion from basic instructions.
• Add examples to help readers understand. When you are trying to explain a technical concept, examples are a major help—analogies in particular.
• Change the level of your examples. You may be using examples, but the technical content or level may not be appropriate to your readers.
• Change the organization of your information. Sometimes, there can be too much background information up front (or too little) such that certain readers get lost. In instructions, it’s sometimes better to feed in chunks of background at the points where they are immediately needed.
• Strengthen transitions. It may be difficult for readers to see the connections between the main sections of your report, between individual paragraphs, and sometimes even between individual sentences. Add transition words like “therefore,” “for example,” and “however” —they indicate the logic connecting the previous thought to the upcoming thought.
• Write stronger introductions—both for the whole document and for major sections. People seem to read with more confidence and understanding when they have the “big picture”—a view of what’s coming, and how it relates to what they’ve just read. For each major section within your document, use mini-introductions that indicate at least the topic of the section and give an overview of the subtopics to be covered in that section.
• Create topic sentences for paragraphs and paragraph groups. This can help readers immensely to give them an idea of the topic and purpose of a section (a group of paragraphs) and in particular to give them an overview of the subtopics about to be covered.
• Change sentence style and length. How you write—down at the individual sentence level—can make a big difference too. Passive, person-less writing is harder to read—put people and action in your writing. All of this makes your writing more direct and immediate—readers don’t have to dig for it. Sentence length matters as well. An average of somewhere between 15 and 25 words per sentence is about right; sentences over 30 words are often mistrusted.
• Work on sentence clarity and economy. Often, writing style can be so wordy that it is hard or frustrating to read. Revise your rough drafts—go through a draft line by line trying to reduce the overall word, page or line count by 20 percent.
• Add cross-references to important information. In technical information, you can help readers by pointing them to background sources.
• Use headings and lists. Readers can be intimidated by big dense paragraphs of writing, uncut by anything other than a blank line now and then.

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