Writing for Your Readers
CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
The objectives of this chapter are to
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Identify the goals of communication.
Explain that in a work context, students must write for a variety of readers and that it is
essential that they determine who their readers are.
Explain how to analyze readers—what questions to ask and what areas to explore.
Explain the importance of determining the purpose for writing.
Explain the importance of understanding one’s role as a writer.
Explain the importance of planning the content of a document and understanding the
context in which that document will be received.
TEACHING STRATEGIES
Using this chapter, students must develop a method for determining and analyzing audiences,
and they should explore some tools they can use to adapt their writing for various audiences
and purposes. When teaching this chapter, you will want to focus on three essential points
that students must understand in order to communicate effectively in a work environment:
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Understanding one’s audience,
Determining one’s purpose, and
Understanding the context in which one’s document will be received and used.
Once students understand the importance of these three issues, they will have the necessary
foundation for communicating successfully. This edition of Reporting Technical Information
departs from the audience analysis technique used in previous editions. In today’s work
context, audiences are more diverse than ever, and although the reader categories used in
previous editions of this text still exist, the lines between the categories have become
increasingly blurred and the practice of categorizing readers has become increasingly
problematic. Therefore, instead of focusing on a set of pre-determined audience types, this
chapter focuses on the necessity of determining as fully as possible for whom one is writing.
Thus, it presents a process by which students may identify and understand their readers—
whoever they are—as fully as possible. The approach in the chapter still relies on what
knowledge readers have and what uses they have for the technical information to be reported.
To build some excitement into this unit, you may wish to focus on adaptation techniques that
enable lay audiences to understand complex technical information. You can build on
everyone’s frustrating experiences with incomprehensible technical manuals; you can point
to the rapid technological change going on in our society; and you can emphasize how
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important it is for writers to be able to make information accessible to readers so that they
can understand and use these new technologies.
At some point, it may also be valuable to discuss with students how readers read documents.
According to Thomas Huckin (“A Cognitive Approach to Readability,” in New Essays in
Technical and Scientific Communication, eds., Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockmann, and
Carolyn R. Miller. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood, 1983, pp. 90-108), there are five ways that
readers approach documents:
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Skimming: going through a document very quickly just to get a general idea of its
content.
Scanning: quickly searching a document for specific pieces of information.
Search Reading: scanning, but more slowly, in order to take in more of the content.
Receptive Reading: seeking to understand the document’s content fully, one reads at
a speed that is comfortable.
Critical Reading: reading to evaluate a document and its contents.
You may wish to point out occasions (or ask the students to) on which students use these
various reading methods in their own lives.
WORKSHOP ACTIVITIES
Here are some in-class activities to help students learn about audience and other issues
covered in Chapter 3.
Traditional Classroom
1. Discuss strongly contrasted excerpts on the same technical topic. Collect and bring to
class (or have your students collect and bring to class) pairs of technical excerpts written
in strongly contrasting ways, for example, an excerpt from Reader’s Digest and another
from Scientific American—both on the same topic. Have students define the
characteristics of the audience that the writers probably had in mind.
2. Discuss interesting documents designed for a variety of audiences. This exercise is
similar to the previous one, only instead of selecting pairs of technical excerpts, select a
variety of documents for interesting audiences. Put the class into pairs, give each pair a
document or set of documents, and ask the students to do a sort of reverse audience
analysis: looking at the documents to determine the characteristics of their readers. Also,
consider providing a brief set of questions for the students to consider:
o Audience and purpose of the document
o Interesting features about page design, writing style, etc.
o Perhaps a question that will guide the students to consider something that you find
especially interesting about the document you’ve provided. For instance, perhaps
the document uses a surprising type of graphic or contains advertising that
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provides insight into audience, or perhaps the document goes out of its way to
create a certain tone or attitude.
Have the students briefly discuss their thoughts about the documents with which they
worked. When I do this assignment, one of my favorite sets of documents is a pair of
November editions of Good Housekeeping, one from 1954 and one from 2004. Students
always enjoy discussing how the audiences for these two magazines have changed over
50 years! Other interesting documents for this exercise include: children’s books;
materials provided to patients by doctors, hospitals, or insurance; take-out menus or
information pamphlets about menu items from various restaurants; articles from
newspapers; university publications intended for non-university readers; and interesting
samples of graphics.
3. Stage an in-class technical explanation. Find one of your more technically astute
students (one who is talkative as well), and have that student attempt to explain a
technical concept to you. As recipient of this information, play as dumb as you dare.
Before this exercise, have students design a chart listing as many techniques for
explaining technical material to laypersons as they can. Have them identify those
techniques as the student attempts to explain the concept to you.
4. Analyze audience adaptation techniques. Have students bring to class well-written
technical discussions aimed at nontechnical audiences and show the rest of the class
which techniques were used.
5. Turn the technical tables. Devise a scenario in which your students must struggle to
understand some complicated technical excerpt. For example, invite a technical expert in
for your students to interview about the excerpt. During and after this exercise, have
students explore this experience to identify which techniques helped them understand.
6. Do an in-class mock audience analysis. To the class, propose one or more hypothetical
report situations and then focus in depth on the audience-analysis phase. Have students
discuss technical level, occupation or position, relationship to the writer, attitude toward
the subject, information needs of the audience, audience’s uses for the information, and
so on.
Computer Classroom
1. Compare Web pages containing similar content but written for different audiences.
This is much like the first activity above. Have students find two Web pages written
about the same topic but for two very different audiences. For example, they may find a
technical Web page about a principle of physics and an online encyclopedia entry about
the same. Have them find audience-appropriate word choices, design (to facilitate reading
habits), content choices, etc., and then demonstrate this comparison for others in the
class.
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2. Gather information about writing contexts in specific fields. Through browsing the
Web, e-mail interviews, and participation in field-related listservs and/or discussion
threads, have students gather information about the most common audiences, purposes,
and author roles in their fields. They may brainstorm interview questions about reading
habits, expectations, attitudes, etc., together or help each other find and subscribe to
listservs or discussion threads. Discuss what is most common in each field, comparing
and contrasting the students’ findings to the descriptions in the chapter.
3. Locate an online journal or magazine, identify its target audience, and analyze how
the publication communicates with that audience. Have students go to an online
journal or magazine that they choose (or perform a search for one), or provide a list of
publications that you want them to use. Once on the sites, have the students identify the
audiences for the publications. They should locate the “About Us” section of the site or
its equivalent (sometimes found in a “For Advertisers” section). Once the students have
identified the audience (or not, if the publication doesn’t clearly identify its audience),
they should examine the publication to identify the ways in which the publication
communicates with its audience (or perhaps fails to).
WRITING PROJECTS
Here are some ideas for writing projects related to Chapter 3.
Traditional Assignments
1. Write a memo on audience-adaptation techniques. Have your students write a memo
summarizing the audience-adaptation techniques they observed in one of the documents
used in any of the classroom activities used above, or have them write a memo analyzing
a technical passage or document that they choose. You may wish to think in broad terms
about what you mean by “technical.” Allow a good bit of latitude in terms of audience
and purpose (perhaps even media) for the document.
2. Translate a technical passage. Have students select a technical excerpt that they
understand but that audiences with less expertise in their fields (or majors) would not.
Have them adapt and rewrite that excerpt for another audience that would not understand
the original document. A less risky and less ambitious version of this exercise is to have
the entire class struggle to understand a technical excerpt that is unfamiliar territory for
all of them. Consider bringing in an expert whom they can interview about the excerpt.
3. Write an audience-purpose analysis to preview a major assignment. Ask students to
prepare for researching and planning a major assignment by writing an in-depth audience
and purpose analysis first. Let them choose the context for the report, proposal, or
instructions, but require them to tell you exactly who the primary and secondary
audiences will be. Have them think in terms of action for the purpose of the document:
what do they want their audience(s) to do after reading?
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Distance Learning Assignments
1. Develop an audience-purpose analysis online. Essentially the same as the third
assignment above, this assignment will require more coordination and intermediate goal
setting for online groups. Remind students of the lag time connected with digital
communication and how their expectations of that can affect their attitudes about the
group. This can be a smaller assignment that can get a group more comfortable before
moving on to tackle larger online work.
2. Create a newsletter for a specified audience. Have small student groups plan a
newsletter that will summarize technical articles about a topic and for an audience of their
choosing. First, have them submit the purpose, topic, audience analysis as a proposal-type
assignment. This initial document should also list the article each student will summarize
and should also state generally how all the articles contribute to an audience-appropriate
theme. Then have each individual student summarize his or her technical article for the
appointed audience. As a group, they will then write an introduction for the newsletter
and decide upon its format and design. This project has a strong individual component
(the summarization) and a nicely proportioned team element (the introduction and
design). It can be a lengthier project—in terms of both time and product—or a shorter
project, depending upon your semester plans.
3. Design an advertisement of your college/university for an online publication. Have
students perform an audience analysis for the online publication they analyzed in the
third computer classroom exercise above. Then have them design an advertisement of
your college/university for that publication and write a memo for you in which they
analyze the audience and discuss how they designed the advertisement to appeal to that
audience.
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RELEVANT LINKS
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Online Technical Writing: Audience Analysis
(http://www.io.com/~hcexres/tcm1603/acchtml/aud.html)
Traci’s Lists of Ten: Ten Audience Analysis Exercises
(http://www.tengrrl.com/tens/013.shtml)
Writing at Colorado State University: Audience
(http://writing.colostate.edu/references/processes/audmod/)
Audience Analysis (http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~kal/netpub/NPaudienceanalysis.html)
Audience Analysis Overview
(http://critical.tamucc.edu/~writing/resources/invent/audience.htm)
WORKSHEET
You may wish to reproduce the following worksheet and have students fill it out as they
analyze an audience to whom they must write.
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Audience-Analysis Worksheet
Document subject: __________________________________________________
Document audience: _________________________________________________
Reader’s knowledge (technical level,
education, experience, cultural
background)
Reader’s interest in subject
Reader’s relationship to you (position
in organization, job title)
Reader’s attitude toward your subject
and purpose (friendly, hostile,
indifferent)
Reader’s information needs (why
he/she is reading)
Document’s purpose (what should the
reader know, think, do, or be able to
do after reading the report)
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OVERHEADS
The figures on the following pages may be reproduced as overhead transparencies or simply
shown on a computer. The following set of discussion questions associated with each of the
figures may be used to elicit student reflections on the concepts.
Discussion Questions for Figure 3-1
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Have you considered these goals as you’ve written documents in the past?
How might thinking about them change the way you write?
Discussion Questions for Figure 3-2
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To what extent have you considered audience as you’ve planned documents in the
past?
What effect do you think that considering these things will have on your writing?
Discussion Questions for Figure 3-3
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Have you ever written in a situation (a job, a position in an organization, etc.) in
which you considered any of these questions?
When you are writing in the workplace, how might you go about getting answers to
these questions?
Discussion Questions for Figure 3-4
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How will your audience’s reading habits vary in relation to their role(s)? Education
and experience?
How do the documents you read (textbooks, Web pages, newspapers, magazines)
appeal to different reading habits?
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Goals of Communication
 You want your readers to understand your
meaning exactly the way you intend
 You want your writing to achieve its goal with
the designated reader(s)
 You want to keep the goodwill of those with
whom you communicate
Figure 3-1: Goals of Communication
The Planning Process
 Determine as fully as possible who will read
what you write
 Know what goals you want your writing to
achieve
 Understand your role in the organization as
a writer and how this should be reflected in
what you write
 Determine the content by considering your
readers’ frame(s) of reference and your
purpose in writing
 Understand the business context in which
you are communicating
Figure 3-2: The Planning Process
Thinking about Your Readers: A Summary of
Considerations
 Who will read your message?
 How much does your reader know about your
topic?
 Is your reader interested in your topic?
 How technical should you be in explaining your
position?
 What does your reader need to know? What is
your purpose in writing?
 How will your reader approach your document?
 What is your business relationship to your
reader?
Figure 3-3: Thinking about Your Readers: A Summary of Considerations
Audience Reading Habits*
 Skimming
 Scanning
 Search reading
 Receptive reading
 Critical reading
*Huckin, Thomas. “A Cognitive Approach to Readability,” New Essays in Technical and
Scientific Communication. Eds., Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockmann, and Carolyn R.
Miller. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood, 1983, pp. 90–108.
Figure 3-4: Audience Reading Habits