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.