Chapter 4 - Addressing Audiences

You're probably wondering why there are 2 posts for chapter four...well, let me kind of explain...I joined Eng271 midway through the second week, 
I was assigned to a blog team (team4) just in time to see that Trevor had allready posted a 
summary by himself.  And now to satisfy the class requirements, here's my summary of chapter 4. =p 

When presenting information, especially technical information, it is important to know your audience. Whether it’s an email, operating procedure, or an oral presentation; knowing your audience’s knowledge and personal interest in the subject matter greatly increases the effectiveness of the information.  Chapter 4 explains pretty thoroughly all the variables you should consider in order effectively communicate technical information.

Identifying the Purpose
There are 2 basic reasons to prepare technical documents or presentations, to inform or to persuade. From my personal experience, most technical documents generally provide some type of information but presentations can be informative and/or persuasive. Figure 4.1 on page 112 provided some questions to consider depending on the purpose of your information.

Identifying the Audience
The book says there are 4 categories of audiences: initial, primary, secondary, and external. The Primary Audience is the biggy, the person(s) who will use the information to perform tasks or make decisions.

Analyzing the Audience
There are several main strategies for analyzing your audience...

• Where/how a technical document will be used
  
• Reason the audience is seeking the information
• Prior knowledge of the audience
• Reading level of the audience
• Organizational role of the audience

A very interesting statistic posed by the reading was that 47-51% of the adult population could not complete simple literacy tasks like finding information in short articles, forms, and tables.  The text didn't mention much on English as a secondary language, but having to communicate information to someone who isn't fluent in English is something we'll all have to do, whether it's orally describing a process to a fellow coworker or developing operating procedures for an overseas division in your company.

Adjusting to Audiences
The three main points presented at the beginning of this section sum this up quite well.

• Adjust complexity of material based on audience knowledge
  
• Shift focus to details that relate to audience's role in an organization
• Design websites that allow users to construct unique sequences of information to meet their own needs/interest

I know I can relate the last point quite well.  I've spent many hours wading through company web pages just looking for the section of the site that might contain the info I needed.