Genres, Audiences, Purposes

It is always necessary to consider your audience when crafting or writing a document. Whether the document be an email, a memo or a proposal. In each of the examples I just listed the audience is a key player in that they are the ones reading your document and, potentially, responding. In all cases the audience will have some type of reaction to the document that is composed and shared.

When I am writing an email I must consider my audience before I begin to craft the email, is my audience a colleague or a customer or my boss. Once that is established I have to consider the purpose of the email I am writing. Am I trying to respond to an inquiry, am I trying to get an answer to a question, or is the email simply informative. Once that is established I have a baseline for how I am going to write and compose my email. For a customer I will be formal and ensure I use less technical jargon, essentially putting the email in terms that makes sense to them. For a colleague I might be more technical in my writing to help in explaining my question. Depending on the colleague I may be more formal or less formal, to determine formality I would consider things like how often do I work with that person, what level are they within the company, how do they compose their own email to me, etc. All of these consideration come into play when writing an email in order to ensure I am writing in a way that will appeal to my audience while also ensuring the information being shared is understood.

The example above is just for email. Different considerations need to be applied when composing other documents. For writing a proposal I would consider my audience in the sense of understanding what would appeal to them. If my proposal would be shared with an executive committee I would focus on the cost savings and streamlining benefits, if my proposal was to the business I would focus on time savings and ease of the application. Once those items are considered I would write my proposal in a way that appeals to the audience, perhaps using graphs and charts for the executive committee and pictures and flows for the business. Understanding the audience is key. In addition, understanding the genre of said audience is also key, what are their demographics, what are their reading and writing skills? I used the word sinew in a conversation and the person I was communicating with did not know what that word meant. Understanding the reading and writing skills of your audience will help when you compose the document. Instead of using the word sinew I might have said stringy as that is a more commonly used word.

A lot of planning and consideration must go in to writing a document but don’t let it overwhelm you because much of this comes through instinct and experience