This week, we’re continuing our general introduction to TPW, especially focusing on audience and exigence/purpose. These concepts are important, and we’ll come back to them again and again for the entire semester. I’ll also introduce correspondence genres, especially email and memos.
Assigned to read this week:
Why am I spending so much time ensuring you’ve got a definition of technical and professional writing lodged in your brains? Definitions are useful boundary objects—as long as they are flexible. They (at least temporarily) set up what we’re focused on and what we’re not. They help frame our critical gaze and sift through the things around us.
At the same time, we should be careful of defintions—beacuse they are by their very nature exclusive, these exclusions can be used to create or reinforce power differentials between different groups. Putting together some of the things we introduced last week, we can say that technical communication is an activity where we create/share communication about specialized knowledge that will help particular audiences or communities take specific action. Expert knowledge–technical knowledge–is based in community and what a community values as knowledge. But here’s the problem: what happens when people outside that community don’t share that community’s values or think that a community’s forms of discourse don’t “count” as discourse? Can a culture’s songs, dances, rituals, and storytelling be technical communication just like manuals, resumes, and reports? A lot of traditional definitions of technical communication would say no, that songs or dances or rituals shouldn’t count—and they would be wrong AF. This also gets into issues around language and technical writing, and the kinds of language that our communications include, exclude, and prioritize.
In Open Technical Writing, Adam Pope defines technical writing as
“writing and communication that conveys essential information that can’t be changed without causing damage to the outcome of using that information. But, we take that with the caveat that who shares that information, they way they share that information, and who they share it to, all of these things will have an impact on the final reception of the technical information. Technical writing then, is an act of translation. We may have to alter a great many things so that our reader/recipient properly understands what we’re getting at, but we’re still trying to get them to understand the same thing we started with. It just may look a lot different after we’ve translated it for them, and they may treat it differently than they would if someone else had shared it with them.” (2018, p. 23)
In your readings this week, really keep going back to and connecting with Race’s six characteristics of TC. Put them in your personal notes, if you haven’t already. According to Race (OTC Chapter 1), TC is:
We’ll unpack each of these in more detail as we go, but this week we’ll focus on the first two: TC is focused on audience, and TC is purposeful and problem-oriented.
“Know your audience” and “You are not your audience” are important points to wrap your brains around. Audience analysis is the process of figuring out who your audience is so you can write to their needs rather than your own. Remember: technical communication addresses particular readers and helps those readers solve problems. Getting out of your own head and into an audience’s head is HARD, and is something we’ll practice a. lot. this semester.
Two big audience-related myths (overgeneralizations, really) that TPW students can sometimes trip over are dumb audiences and general audiences:
I have this imaginary (slightly based in reality) figure I use as an example in lectures sometimes named “Uncle Steve.” Every family has an Uncle Steve–that person that needs things explained to them five times and still doesn’t quite understand (and maybe doesn’t want to). The dude who always derails your Facebook or Instagram comments with some irrelevant stuff about “kids these days don’t know how to whatever anymore…” Uncle Steve is nice enough, and you love him, but he kind of always misses the point.
Occasionally in professional and technical writing articles online you’ll see guidance to “explain it to me like I’m five,” which assumes that all technical writing is about making really complex things sensible to people with zero knowledge of the subject.
Unfortunately, that’s often not true. In fact, that viewpoint is a one-dimensional and ultra-condescending way of looking at professional and technical writing. Doing audience analysis is NOT about assuming your audience is dumber than you. (Put yourself in the reverse position–do you want everyone assuming you’re the dumb one? Nope.) Instead, audience analysis is about considering what your readers know already, what they need to know, and how they need to know it. If you write like a 6th-grader to a Ph.D. or a small-business owner, you’re going to make someone mad. Figure out who the specific kind of person is on the other end of your communication and write to them (user experience and web designers use something called personas).
The Plain Language Act website has two great short resources on addressing audiences: Do your research and Address the user.
The lazy person’s answer to “who’s your audience?” on social media and lots of government or organizational communication is “the general public.” That is wrong. Here’s a solid essay on the topic if you want to read someone other than me say it: There is No General Public: Starting with Audience for Stronger Science Communication Plans
One more time for the people in the back: “The general public” is not your audience.
Certainly, in a lot of cases anybody will be able to see and access your stuff. That’s among the default implications of rhetorical velocity and social media as a delivery system and public access to information in a transparent democratic republic. But really we should be talking about publics and groups: audiences rather than some generic “the public.” Audiences are people who need or will work with your content, and are those folks whom your content is designed specifically for. That publicly available government web page about victim impact statements uses “you” and “your” in its language, and that pronoun is directed to very specific people: victims of a crime. That’s substantially different from “the general public” because the audience in that case has specific tasks to do, specific knowledge to rely on and knowledge they don’t have, and specific goals or problems to solve. Similarly, the Corpus Christi Independent School District (CCISD) Facebook page might be out there on social media for anyone and their aunt to see, but their audience is specifically the CCISD community of parents, administration and staff, and students.
Even though “the public” might have access to your document, that doesn’t mean your document’s audience is the public. The public is a stakeholder in many federal, state, and municipal communications–that’s why we have access, because it affects us and we should be able to see how our federal, state, and local governments function to a reasonable extent. But the audience–the people for whose use a text is purposefully written–is different. In the case of a police report, for example, there are really three audiences who are going to use/read the document in different ways:
Notice who’s not in the list: people who the report is about (i.e. suspects, victims, or people involved in the reported incident) and the public. Both groups do have a relative stake in a police report, but in most cases the report acts as a record that the person can obtain rather than a document that’s written to them. Because it is about them, because they have a right to documentation that’s about them, or because they have a vested interest in the outcome, they are a stakeholder, but not an audience. If you’ve ever gotten a traffic citation, on the other hand, it likely has instructions for how to handle the citation, where to pay a fine, what website or municipality you need to report to, and that sort of thing. For that stuff, you’re most definitely the audience. But in that case, you’re no longer “the public”—you’re a specific audience “person who has received a citation”, one with a different set of needs, goals, attitudes, and experiences from some general public.
I don’t want to push this “public” rant too far—I’m not saying it’s not a real thing or that documents aren’t directed to the public ever. What I am saying is that “the public” is a less useful construct for us as writers than a more specific vision of a community or of types of persons we’re addressing or communicating with through our writing.
The above information comes from Leslie Seawright’s fine 2012 dissertation, “The Literacy Practices of Law Enforcement”. She published this research in 2017 as Genres of Power
Some examples of distinguishing between audiences:
Now hold on a second and back up to that list of readers for the police report. Not only did that one teensy little narrative have three different audiences, but each of those audiences had an entirely different reason for using the police report. So, when we’re talking about TPW, not only do texts frequently have multiple audiences, those audiences probably have different needs and purposes.
Let’s break our police report example down in a table:
| Audiences of a police report | and their purpose for reading that report |
|---|---|
| The officer’s supervisor | Reviews and collaborates (via editing or requesting revisions) to ensure document is complete, correct, and clear; wants document to represent department well. |
| The district attorney or prosecutor | Reviews for details related to chargeable and prosecutable offenses; looks for details so they can make a decision and build a strong case. |
| The defense attorney | Reviews for errors, gaps, problems; wants to find problems with the report that undermine its or the officer’s authority. |
Another example: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates civil aviation, highway, marine, and other kinds of accidents. Their goal is to collect and record facts and determine probable cause, but the NTSB isn’t regulatory). Part of their process is generating lots and lots of reports. NTSB accident report audiences are broadly summarized as “anyone who can affect change to improve transportation safety” (NTSB style guide 1-3), but that includes a diverse bunch of people with different needs: Congress, Government transportation agencies, industry officials, and the news media.
Purpose refers to why writers are writing, but it also has to do with why audiences are reading. So, with your writing, you might have generic purposes like documenting or creating a record, giving or requesting information, coordinating resources, justifying a decision, or persuading someone. Now think about audiences’ different purposes for reading: are they trying learn something new? make a decision? implement a course of action? advise someone else? select from different options? What are they going to DO with what you’ve written?
I can remember lots of times in school or college where I mostly just sat at a blinking computer screen thinking “Why do I have to write this?” In school, mostly the purpose for writing is to display your knowledge or mastery and to get a good grade. The audience (your teacher) already knows the material or at least the method involved, and wants you to show them that you know what they say you should know, and that you know that they know you know. With workplace writing, proving your brilliance generally ain’t the point. Your purpose is all about getting sh** done or helping other people get their sh** done.
As a writer, a clear sense of purpose can inform your invention and writing process, and can help you make choices about genre and style. If you have a clear sense for why you’re writing and what you’re trying to accomplish with it, you’ll be able to make lots of decisions along the way about what to include or leave out, what voice or tone to use, or how much you have to explain about your graphs and tables. (And that’s all stuff we’ll talk about through the semester.)
As a reader, being able to determine the purpose of a document can help you know what to do with it and whether or not it’s relevant to your needs. A clear title, subject line, or introduction helps you understand the text’s subject, why you should read it, and what you need to do with it. Sometimes a purpose becomes so inherent and repeated in an organization that it becomes presumed as part of a genre’s reason for being and doesn’t have to be stated anymore. That’s why things like syllabi, resumes, and product manuals don’t always have purpose statements. But you’ll see from examples throughout the semester that explicit statements of purpose are common in many professional and technical genres. Some examples:
| Example | Purpose statement from the text |
|---|---|
| How-to article, installing window unit A/Cs | “Here, I’ll share some tips on what to consider when buying an air conditioner, and then how to install it securely and remove it for winter storage.” |
| NOAA Service Assessment report, Hurricane Katrina | “This report provides specific recommendations and highlights best practices to be applied to NWS operations in future hazardous events.” |
| OSHA Guidance on Preparing Workplaces for COVID-19 | “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) developed this COVID-19 planning guidance based on traditional infection prevention and industrial hygiene practices. It focuses on the need for employers to implement engineering, administrative, and work practice controls and personal protective equipment (PPE), as well as considerations for doing so. This guidance is intended for planning purposes. Employers and workers should use this planning guidance to help identify risk levels in workplace settings and to determine any appropriate control measures to implement.” |
Not every document has an explicit statement of purpose, but once you start looking for them you’ll start seeing them all over the place. Some of your teachers might frown on this kind of purpose statement, but this class is a safe space for you to try them out. I encourage you to start drafting with some version of the following; doing so will help you clarify what you’re trying to do early on when purpose can be kind of nebulous:
You’ll also sometimes see introductions (such as the OSHA example in the table above) that clarify purpose and audience at the same time. These statements help readers decide whether a document is relevant to their needs and if they should read it or not:
Even if it feels a little training wheels-ish at first, that’s okay; you can always revise those statements into something more appropriate for your audience in a later draft. I won’t talk about them here, but titles and subject lines are other key spaces where we can pick up information about audience and purpose.
Complete the "1.3 Readers & Purposes" discussion thread in your group forum before 5:00 pm on Tuesday.
Along with the assignment itself, this will be the first time I'm **requiring** you to use Office 365 to *share* documents with your group through a link rather than *upload* documents to Blackboard. This walkthrough explains how to share documents through Office 365 and post a link to them in Blackboard.
In this folder I have a pretty weird and random collection of professional reports, technical documents, manuals, and other stuff. Pick any three items out of the folder. For each of the three items:
Put all of the above into a PowerPoint file and share it in the 1.3 discussion thread. As with any link or post, please include a short introductory comment–summarize the contents of your slideshow or describe something you learned about audiences and purposes for this assignment.
Look at and reply to your peers’ slideshows, compare notes, and discuss the variety of ways the documents reveal their audience and purpose (or do not). What worked? What made that info easy to find? What made it hard to find? When should information about purpose and audience even be included in a document? When might you not need to include that info?
Here’s my version of it:
Complete the “7Cs, email, and workplace writing” discussion thread in your group
Do not upload an external document. You can just paste this one directly into the forum.
In Week 3 we’ll spend time reading and talking about rhetoric and other foundational concepts that will help you understand and practice technical and professional writing this semester.