Re: Idiot Audience

["Eric J. Ray" <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM>]

At 03:23 PM 11/17/97 +0000, Damien Braniff wrote:
>I wasn't suggesting that you treat all audiences as idiots.  However, it
>is, unfortunately, not always possible to do audience analysis - well not
>reliably anyway.
<SNIP>

If it's not possible to do audience analysis, it's not possible
to write anything or communicate anything. Even an unreliable
or fragmented audience analysis is essential to function as
a technical communicator.

Worst case scenario: You have a writing assignment--say, a
white paper--with no specific audience and no specific purpose.
You're expected to take this project and run with it.
You MUST analyze your audience, if only to arbitrarily state
that they're like a major newspaper audience because you
don't know anything else. If you don't,
you have less than no idea what to write, how to write it,
or even where to start.

I truly can't imagine being able to write sentence one without
audience analysis. Interestingly, although the concept and
implementation has made sense to me since I started as a
technical communicator, I've found that it gets increasingly important
as I gain experience. I can't remember the last conversation
with an editor/publisher/agent/client or even co-author/spouse
that didn't FOCUS on audience analysis, nearly to the exclusion
of everything else.

Do audience analysis and the writing is easy.
Don't do audience analysis and the writing is futile.

IMNSHO,
Eric



**************************************************
Eric J. Ray                      ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com
TECHWR-L Listowner         http://www.raycomm.com/

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