Technical Writing Midterm: Audience and Purpose

Audience profile sheet

A form that prompts you to consider various audience characteristics as you plan your document.

Personal preferences

Accommodate biases in stylistic or design considerations

Cultural characteristics

Appeal to interests and avoid being offensive or confusing.

Tertiary audience

Audience that consists of people even further removed from the writer who might take an interest in the subject of the report. Ex. interest groups, local, state, and federal government officials, and the general public

Secondary audience

Audience that consists of people more distant from the writer who need to stay aware of developments int he organization but who will not directly act on or respond to the document. Ex. managers of other departments and representatives from the marketing and legal departments

Primary audience

Audience that consists of people to whom the communication is directed. They may be inside or outside the writer's own organziation. Ex. the writer's team members, supervisor, executive

Professional experience

Content and style influenced by experience in the field

low-context cultures

Cultures that believe a written text must be comprehensive, containing all the information a reader needs to understand it. Tend to be individualistic.

high-context cultures

Cultures that value documents in which some of the details are merely implied. Tent to be group oriented.

Education

How much supporting material is needed, vocabulary, sentence structure and length, what kind of graphics to include, and whether to provide other formal elements

Personal characteristics

How the text can help in considerations of age, impaired vision or physical limitations, or other individual attributes

The way your reader will read your document, your reader's reading skill, the physical environment in which your reader will read your document, and the digital environment in which your reader will read your document.

In thinking about how your readers will use your document, it is important to consider what four factors?

culture

The beliefs, attitudes, and values that motivate people's behaviors

Focus on individuals or groups, distance between business life and private life, distance between ranks, need for details to be spelled out, and attitude toward uncertainty

What are the five key variables for understanding the culture "beneath the surface"?

Who are you reader?, Why are your audience reading your document?, What are your readers' attitudes and expectations? And, How will your readers use your document?

What are the four questions Markel proposes you should ask yourself about the audience to produce an effective report?

Searching for information on the internet (social media and company websites), listing what is already known and needs to be discovered, interviewing people, and reading the documents your audience has written

What are the four ways Markel recommends we learn about our audience?

Political, economic, social, religious, educational, technological, linguistic

What are the seven major categories of cultural variables that lie on the surface?

The reader's education, professional experience, job responsibility, personal characteristics, personal preferences, and cultural characteristics

What six factors should you consider when writing for your most important readers?

Job responsibility

Whether to include information on how to carry out a plan or procedure in the workplace

modular

broken down into components addressed to different readers