Write for your audience, not against them

What is an audience?

In technical writing, your audience is your intended reader: it's who you're writing for. Usually, your audience can be categorized into the following groups:

• Experts: These are the people who generate ideas about the project/product and may have even designed or tested it. They have a high level of technical knowledge.

• Technicians: These are the people who build and maintain the project/product. They also have a high level of technical knowledge, but it may be more practical and less theoretical than expert knowledge.

• Executives: These are people who fund projects/products and make decisions about them on a business or administrative level. Their technical knowledge level is usually lower than experts or technicians, and is often similar to the knowledge level of non-specialists. 

• Non-specialists: These are typically the end-users of a product or the people curious about a project. They have the lowest technical knowledge level. Unless you are writing instruction manuals for the public, non-specialists are usually a secondary audience.

Your audience may fit into more than one of these groups. For example, executives and technicians may read your reports. Use your best judgment when adapting your tone and style in these cases. It may be simplest to write the entire report at the lowest technical level of your audience (executives). Or, your report may include particular sections that only technicians will read. With that in mind, you can write those sections at a higher technical level.

Why is it important to know your audience?

You must identify and understand your intended audience in technical writing. Why? Your audience determines what information you present and how you present it. Technical writing that fails in its purpose often does so because the writer did not take their audience into account.

Imagine that you are writing a grant to request funding from a company, and you describe the project with an expert level of technical details and jargon. To an expert, your writing is clear and thorough. But your audience is not experts because they do not provide funding. The executives who do read your grant will be confused and may not fund the project because they do not understand it. The successful grant is the one that the executives understand.

How do you identify your audience?

Audience analysis is a way to identify and understand your intended audience by asking two key questions:

• What are my readers' backgrounds? (What is their knowledge, experience, training, etc.?)

• What do they want/need? (Or, what are reader expectations?)

Depending on the writing project, you may ask many more questions to determine other aspects of your audience, like demographics. However, these two questions should serve you well in most scenarios and help you to adjust your technical writing accordingly.

How do you write for different audiences?

How you write for your audience will vary depending on the topic, but here are some general rules of thumb:

• Provide background information for audiences unfamiliar with the topic. Background information can take the form of introductions, definitions of key terms, or explanations of previous work on the project/product. Experts and technicians may want background information that contextualizes the project in the technical field or compares it to other technical concepts. Non-specialist and executive audiences will probably need more basic background information like definitions and clear, concise summaries.

• Add examples to help audiences understand complex ideas. Examples may not be necessary for experts on the topic, but especially for complex technical concepts, examples are a great way to connect with your audience. Experts may benefit from highly technical examples, while non-specialists or executives will benefit more from simpler examples. 

• Remove unnecessary information. Experts and technicians may get bored or annoyed by too much basic information because they are already well-versed in the topic and may not need a step-by-step explanation of it. On the other hand, executives and non-specialists will probably not want to read theoretical discussion or pages of jargon in basic instructions or reports. Identify the essential information for your audience, and stick with that. 

• Make your organization easy to follow. It can be easy for readers of all audiences, but especially those unfamiliar with the topic, to get lost in technical writing that is just one big text block. Headings, transitions, and topic sentences are key for guiding your reader efficiently through your writing. Think of them like sign posts: they tell your reader what each section or paragraph will focus on and will allow your reader to connect the logic throughout. You can also reuse keywords to help guide your reader, instead of trying to find synonyms which may confuse them. 

Ultimately, how you write for your audience will depend on the project, but using these tips will help you make your technical writing and all of the important ideas it contains as accessible as possible for your audience.