In this chapter Burnett discusses the importance of identifying your purpose, categorizing types of audiences, and analyzing factors that influence them.
Identifying Purposes
The two broad purposes of those professionals who prepare technical documents, presentations and visuals are;
1. To accurately convey verifiable information
- What information do I want my audience to learn?
- Why do I want them to learn this information?
- What decisions does the audience need to make?
- What information does the audience need in order to make a decision?
- What background information do I need to provide?
- What questions do I want to answer?
- What ideas or actions of the audience do I want to influence?
- What information and approaches will persuade the audience?
- What constraints will affect the persuasiveness of my argument?
- What objections might the audience have? What logical argument would enable me to overcome those objections?
People may have both primary and secondary purposes for reading. Chapter 3 discussed three typical reasons including reading to assess, to learn, to learn to do.
Identifying Audiences
Every technical document has an intended audience, a specific individual or category of users, with identifiable needs. Audiences of technical documents often want information about specific rather than general issues. This information might be read by different audiences in several different ways. So you are often expected to create material that meets the needs of several categories of audiences. This can be done by directing different audiences to particular sections of the document.
Audience roles can be divided into four categories based on several factors;
- Initial Audience – Person to whom you submit the document. This person directs the document to the appropriate primary audience.
- Primary audience – Person whom the document is intended. This person uses the information and makes decisions.
- Secondary audience – Person who receive and read the document, have an interested and are affected by the information or decisions based on the document.
- External Audience – Person outside the immediate organization but affected by the information or decisions based on the document.
ANALYZING AUDIENCES
One of the most frequently used strategies for analyzing audience involves considering these characteristics;
- 1. Context in which a document is interpreted and used.
- Purpose and motivation of the audiences
- Prior knowledge of the audience (education and profession).
- Reading level of the audiences.
- Organizational role of the audiences.
Context
To ease the audience’s task, technical communicators use organizational or graphic devices. The following strategies are of importance:
- Initial abstracts or summaries
- Headings and subheadings
- Use of descending order
- Definition of terms
- Transitions showing how different section of document relate to each other
- Visuals to make information easily accessible
- Page layout that is not crowded or cluttered
Purpose and Motivation
It is easy to analyze an audience’s purpose and motivation if you know the intended audience. To increase audience receptivity and decrease resistance, it is important to know the audience’s purpose and motivation.
- Receptive audiences: Present the recommendations initially and then support them in subsequent sections.
- Resistance audiences: Present problem, discuss alternatives then lead to the most appropriate and feasible solution.
By You can determine the appropriate vocabulary and content by knowing your audiences prior knowledge. Allow with this knowledge comes the level, type and duration of that education.
- Vocational-Technical Training: focuses on providing a practical or applied knowledge.
- Professional or Acedemic Training: focuses on providing a theoretical understanding as well as a practical experience.
Reading Level
This refers to the difficulty of material that audiences are able to comprehend. If an audience does not understand what you are saying, the speech is pointless. This area is not based on intelligence, as there are highly intelligent people that have a low reading level or may better at reading material in one specialized area but not in another.
Readability Formulas can be used to text a documents readability, but they are limited to only a few formulas and are therefore never 100% accurate. They work on the premise that shorter words and sentences are easier to read. This is not always true. It can also be effected by content, context, purpose, audience, organization, visuals, design, usability, and language conventions.
Limited Literacy is another problem of reading level. This means one of two things:
- That someone is skillful at reading in some circumstances, but not in other; or
- Someone just doesn't get much information from any written documents
Organizational Role
Organizations are generally split into two groups:
- Hierarchical - Bosses at top, managers in the middle, workers at the bottom. Assumes people work best when directed.
- Non-Hierarchical - Everyone contributes evenly. Assumes people work best when they participate in decision making
ADJUSTING TO THE AUDIENCE
There are three way to adjust to the audience: differences in expertise, differences in roles and stances, and by construct unique sequences of information. Two of these will be described in greater detail.
Differences in Expertise
When adjusting material for different audiences with various levels of technical knowledge, you may need to change the complexity of topic. A document written for a medical professional may not be suited for a high school or college student.
Differences in Roles and Stances
When preparing something for an audience, the role or stance of the receiver should be taken into account. A document written to a co-worker will be written differently then a document written to a manager. To make this as effective as possible, be sure to consider the following:
- Identify and write for the primary audiences.
- Identify and consider the secondary audiences.
- Use design elements to make information accessible in both paper and electronic messages.
15 comments:
Nelson and Kithinji's summary on chapter four is well written and informative. This chapter would have been useful in preparing for the city councel presentation. I think we should have asked ourselves more questions that Burnett outlines in chapter four. Some of these questions or concerns include: knowing your audience and asking yourself what you are trying to accomplish with this presentation. This chapter is a good example of how technical communications meets with classic oral presentations. Although it is easy to communicate electronically, in order to convince and audience it is necessary to address them in person.
I thought that this chapter on adressing audiences is very important and is used daily in everyone's life. It's important to recognize who you are talking to and to make sure that all of your information is valid and to make sense in the situation that you are in. We adress audiences everyday and we don't even really realize it until we stop to think about it. Adressing audinces should be held at the same importance as speech classes. Using tips that burnett gives can improve your people skills and can provide you with information to better presentations that you may give in the future.
Bradley Seykora
Chp. 4 Addressing Audiences
This Chapter’s Summary gives a lot of information to not only help in writing technical documents but also information to help when giving a presentation. There are tons of factors involved when looking at what kind of audience you are speaking to. Audiences’ expect a lot of involvement on the speaker’s intelligents on what ever subject they are talking about. Your audience is the important part when deciding what type of language and reading level to write your document in. The audience can be extremely judgmental if you as a presenter or writer of a document do not talk in language that they will understand.
It is very important to be aware of the audience in which you are presenting to. One example for me is when I am giving a presention to the other students in my major I do not have to go into detail about the things that are typical knowledge to CDIS majors. I had to change the way I spoke about the topic of Speech Language Pathology when I gave my TPR report for this class because nobody was familiar with the topic. I had to explain anything that would otherwise cause confusion among the audience.
I think that the summary of this chapter was very well written. Come to think of it the details in this chapter would've been great help in the proposal to the city. As well as almost any type of presentation, you have to know your audience, relating to them, and the way you try and get to them is very important. This chapter is a good example of how technical communication meets with oral presentations. It is easy to give information electronically but it is much better to give information in person to really get the feel and emotion.
Chapter four does a very good job of explaining the importance of identifying the audience that you will be presenting to. This doesn’t just happen when we are presenting something, but also when we are conversing with people everyday. We need to assess who the person is that we are talking to and their education level so we don’t talk over their heads and confuse them. I feel that the book gives us some really good tips to follow when we are addressing the audience that will definitely help us when it comes to giving presentations.
When addressing audiences we should consider three types of audiences: offensive, neutral, and positive audiences. Before addressing to the audiences we need to verify the information we got and think whether we can persuade the audience or not. The audience might have some objections. Other constraints may affect the persuasiveness of the expresser’s arguments. By knowing the prior knowledge, an addresser can use appropriate vocabulary, and analyze an audience’s purpose and motivation. The blog was, infact helpful and knowledgeable.
being able to address an audience with not only acurracy in your information, but also speaking at the level of the audience. when ever i have had to do a presentation in my life i have always tried very hard to relate what i am talking about. by doing this you get the audience to pay closer attintion to what you are saying, and therefore giving a much more effective presentation.
This chapter is more focus when we do our presentation toward the audience. The text which we have full of information to delivery can make how we can convince with the audience.I have learn this in my speech class also that to make audience more focus on the point we speak. This chapter give more point to develop the way to address audience and how to implement the subject.
This chapter summery is indeed informative and important; I think addressing audiences is one thing that we should never forget while presenting. The information we use should be easy to understand for the audience for instance, if I am presenting about biology for engineering students I should be aware of using the biological terms which they might not understand. In other words, on the basis of the audience the use of language structure and speed of presentation varies.
This summary is very important since u always have to pay attention to your audience when you are talking. Burnett gives some good tips on adressing these audiences. you will sound like much brighter person if u pay attention to your audience and talk to their level
This is one thing that I think a lot of people need to work on. Last I heard speaking in front of people was one of the number one fears in America. One thing to keep in mind is who is your audience, a presenter obviously needs to shift the way he presents based on who his listeners are.
This is a very useful chapter because you should know how to address your audience if you are giving a speech or a proposal. I liked how this chapter gave you your possible audiences and how you should approach them. It also talked about how you should speak the level of your audience. If you are not speaking at the level that your audience is at then they will not listen to you and start to get board or even frustrated. I think that they did a very good job writing up the summery of this article and it was very easy to read.
Adressing audiences is a very important and can come in handy during every day life. when you are talking to your child, you will not be using the same types of commmunicating as you would with your boss. i thought this summary was very well written and i think that alot of people would benefit from learning about adressing audiences. sometimes people talk over their audience and then their audience doesnt learn a single thing.
This is one of the most important elements in writing. No matter who you are writing for if it is not catching their attention it is your fault for not knowing them better ahead of time.
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