The ability to figure out who will read your documents and what they will be looking for can make or break a piece of technical writing. Get your audience wrong, and whatever you write will be useless.
For everything you write in this course, you need to identify who your readers are and why they are reading your document. Watch the Audience Analysis Playlist (12m 22s) that I created on LinkedIn Learning, which consists of three short videos (free with your VT login). Follow these instructions to login.
Video: Evaluate audience needs
From Course: Technical Writing: Reports with Judy Steiner-Williams
Video: Examine the technical audience
From Course: Technical Writing: Reports with Judy Steiner-Williams
Video: Understand the nontechnical audience
From Course: Technical Writing: Reports with Judy Steiner-Williams
After watching the videos, you can write a reply that considers one of the following questions:
- How does the advice in the videos compare to that in the textbook?
- Describe a situation when you encountered a document that didn’t fulfill your needs as a reader. What would you do to improve the document?
- Tell us about a situation when a document fit your needs perfectly. What did it do well? How would it need to change for a different group of readers?