Importance of Audience Involvement in Technical Writing

Communication is a process of transferring information from one person to

another. More commonly, it is defined as "the imparting or interchange of

thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs". All forms of

communication require a sender, a message, and an intended recipient

(audience). Communication can be auditory such as speech, song and tone of

voice; and nonverbal such as body language, sign language, paralanguage,

touch, eye contact, through media, i.e., pictures, graphics and sound, and writing.

Communicating through writing, speech and other media to a specific

audience is a form technical communication. Technical writers fall into the

category of people who communicate with the audience under this category.

They explain related ideas to technical and non-technical audience. Technical

writing itself is a form of formal writing used in diverse fields of communication,

for example from computer hardware and software to aerospace industry,

robotics, finance as well as biotechnology. It can be as simple as telling a

costumer how to use TV remote control or as complicated as telling a

programmer how to use a software library. Technical writers gather information

from existing documentation and from subject matter experts (SME). They then

translate the complex technical concepts and instructions into simpler language

for their audience. A good technical writer needs strong language and teaching

skills and must understand the many conventions of modern technical

communications. They must understand their audience type and the goals of

their audience.

Audience analysis is necessary for technical writing. As mentioned before,

audience is the most important part of a communication chain; it is to whom all

the information is directed. As a writer, one should anticipate the needs and

expectations of their audience in order to convey information or argue for a

particular claim. There are various ways of categorizing an audience. For a

student submitting an assignment, the teacher may be the audience; for a

teacher, his students are the audience; for newscasters, the people watching the

news are the audience; and for a technical writer, the person interested in that

particular writing manual is the audience. Thus to convey a general idea to the

audience, it is necessary to define and understand one’s audience.

According to Michel Muraski from Department of Journalism and

Technical Communication of Colarado State University, there are three types of

audience: “lay” audience, “managerial” audience, and “experts”. The “lay”

audiences necessarily do not know about the concerned subject. They are just

asking on the general instinct of human curiosity of knowing stuff around one’s

own self. They only need some background information i.e. they expect more of

definition and description, and the visuals and graphics attract them more. The

“managerial” audience may or may not have more information on the subject

matter than the “lay” audience but they are gathering information to make a

decision about the subject. In this case, one should highlight any background

information, facts, and statistics so that a decision could be made easily. The

“experts” are the most demanding audience of all in terms of knowledge,

presentation, and graphics or visuals. They already know a lot about the

concerned subjects. So for them, document formats are often elaborate and

technical, style and vocabulary may be specialized or technical, source citations

are reliable and up-to-date, and documentation is accurate.

One always writes for an audience, whether he/she realize it or not.

Audience is a very generalized group of readers. Keeping the type of audience in

mind while writing can help one make good decisions about what material to

include, in what order to organize ideas, and how best to support an argument.

For a general writer, say one, who writes a letter to someone, keeping the type of

audience in mind is necessary. Suppose a person writes two letters: one to a

grandmother and one to a best friend describing the first month at new college.

Unless that person has an extremely cool grandma to whom that person would

be very close, the two letters certainly will look very much different in terms of

content, structure and even tone.

The same is the case with a technical writer. A technical writer must

understand the level of his/her audience’s knowledge, whether they know what

the technical writer is trying to say. The same sentence that carries a strong

message to one reader or listener might be meaningless with another. Suppose

two types of readers are reading the following sentence: one are those who are

reading theory while the others are the general public,

“The reader’s linguistic schemata is as important as the reader’s prior knowledge

of the content (‘content schemata’) and of rhetorical organization”.

This sentence is quite clear to students of reading theory, but probably

unreadable for most people. This very sentence can also be put in this way:

“You need to know how well your reader reads and what your reader already

knows about the topic”.

Obviously this sentence is understandable to every single person. It makes

absolutely perfect sense. The other one also did; the only excuse for the first

sentence is that every field has its own language (its jargon), and experts in that

field are supposed to know that jargon. So if a person uses a language alien to a

listener while communicating, he will surely have to define and explain certain

terms before using them. And besides, it will affect the reader’s interest in the

script.

So from above example, one must need to take into account certain

considerations about one’s audience. Things one should know about their

audience:

1. What is their general reading level?

2. What is their knowledge of the subject?

3. What exactly is the audience’s purpose?

As far as reading level is concerned, it should be the one which could be

understood by majority of the readers, for example an eighth-grade reading level

is chosen while writing a newspaper for general public. Most of the people

reading the paper can understand language at a level higher than this but

communicating at a low level is more preferable. If a writing is easy and clear, the

audience is much more likely to read it and remember it.

Next comes the knowledge of an audience about a particular subject. If they

know about a certain subject, they will understand the topic real well and quite

quickly. Otherwise, one would have to add some background information or

define certain terms for readers unfamiliar with the topic.

The last point to remember is the audience’s purpose as to why they are reading

or listening to someone: whether they just want a background information or they

really are interested, whether they wants to hear about it or someone from an

advertising company is just publicizing something. If a person himself is

interested in something and wants specific information on a subject, then he

would like a general quite detailed article about it. For example in the case of an

electronic device, the writer would be required to produce a writing in which he

would describe the function of that device, how it is operated, the negative and

positive aspects of that device etc. However, if the person is merely writing for

advertisement purposes only, he should directly get to the point right at the

beginning. People in the outside world are far too busy to pay attention to

advertisements so they need something that will catch their immediate attention.

Also in the case of writing a circular or another information brochure, the writing

should be as much brief and informative as possible. Once a case has been

reported in which a boss called a department meeting; on the third page of the

memo was mentioned something about some important changes in departmental

procedures but it failed to affect many people. The employees did not read the

memo all the way through and so a great number did not showed up for the

meeting.

In case of technical writers, their writings must be useful for the audience.

The readers must be able to understand them and act on them without having to

decode wordy and ambiguous prose. In good technical writing, use of jargon

must be avoided so that it may present useful information that is clear and easy

to understand for the intended audience. Use of unnecessary jargon makes a

writing confusing and is a sign of poor technical writing. It fails to explain

unavoidable technical terms that reader would not be expected to be familiar

with. Engineers, scientists and other professionals may also serve as technical

writers. They necessarily are not subject matter experts (SME) but know quite a

lot about their field. They try to communicate with their audience on a level better

known to both, the writer and the audience.

A writer must omit any unnecessary information that the reader do not

want to read about in a transcript. The article might be too pitchy for a reader

from technical point of view i.e. it may be at a high or low technical level. It may

be pitched at the wrong kind of audience like for “expert” audience rather “lay”

audience if you are dealing with one. This happens most often when product-

design notes are passed off as instructions. Examples on the other hand, are a

powerful way to connect with an audience. Even in noninstructional texts for

example, while explaining a mere technical concept, examples attract a great

deal of audience attention. However the examples must also be carefully chosen.

Homespun examples may not be useful to experts; highly technical ones may

totally miss the nonspecialist readers. Another important aspect that must be

taken into consideration is the organization of the information in a writing.

Sometimes a script has all the necessary right information but has arranged it in

the wrong way. Reading a transcript like this may make the reader to get lost.

Audience involvement in a writing must be the sole purpose of a technical

writer so that his idea may better may received and then adapted. Apart from

reading level selection and defining one’s audience, it is necessary that the writer

may have the potential of attracting more and more of the audience. The sole

way to attract nontechnical audience is by using a good representation of data.

The font style of the script, using small and bullet sentences, and paragraphing

makes an article less ambiguous. Sentences must be clear and topic sentences

for paragraphs can be introduced. Use of graphics is an important and easy way

communication with the amateur audience. “Expert” audience on the other hand,

is not easily bought just by these characteristics of a transcript. They need more

of the specific information on the subject with strong arguments proving

something is worth as is being described, along with these.

A technical writer’s success, therefore, solely depends upon how the

audience takes his/her point of view. So it must be considered first if the

information passed on to a specific audience is really what it is asked for and

whether it serves the purpose fully or not.