atw: Re: Audience Analysis

  • From: "Christine Kent" <cmkentau@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:03:47 +1100

Michelle
I'm wondering what people mean by audience analysis. I've always thought we
meant pitching our text to the audience (what jargon do they understand, how
educated are they etc). I'm wondering if we should also include our
audience's reading habits, as in the example I gave to Brian where newspaper
articles are structured to take advantage of the way in which newspaper
readers shift from article to article as they read or on the internet, where
readers skim what is visible on the screen and based on the content can
elect to scroll further. Some of what Christine's saying may relate to this
(though she should comment on this).

Christine
I think you are right.  For example, we all change both our layout and our
writing style between user manuals, instructional guides and business
documents.  Business documents start with an executive summary so that the
supposedly busy managers get to read the gist of the document without having
to wade through the detail.  Then follows the detail, subdivided to suit the
various readership groups such as technical analysts, financial analysts,
users etc, and often after that, the appendices as supporting material.  We
would never structure an IT manual or a training guide in the same way.  

We now have added a range of different layout requirements, courtesy of
computers and the internet, that have created yet another set if standards
for layout and accessibility.  I think we might instinctively adapt to
expected concentration span, expected level of skim reading, access and
search requirements etc, but I confess that I have read very little about
this except for "usability" studies for screen layout, and instructional
design for computer delivered training.  

Web pages have mostly changed from single column layout to two, three of
four column layout, so that all aspects of the site can be visually
available on the first page, without scrolling.  This has replaced the
"table of contents" of a manual.  As I have been playing with blog layout, I
have discovered by trial and error that some types of site work best with a
two column layout, and some are better with 3 or 4 columns.  I guess if I
had thought about it up front, there will be some text somewhere that would
advise which column layout is better for which style and purpose of blog,
but as this is my hobby, not my profession, I had not bothered to find the
research.

Michelle
...How many of us think about structure? (Note, I'm not accusing anyone, I'm
raising this as something we might discuss).

Christine
One role I had was to review all the templates used by a business analysis
team for a major council, and ensure they all were well designed and guided
their users to write good clear documents.  I also wrote a manual to support
the templates which guided the user through which template to select and how
to use it in more detail.  We did that so that non-specialist writers
(business analysts mostly) were helped to structure a document
appropriately.  It seems to me that most corporate templates are designed to
take the decision of how to structure a document away from the author.
Junior TWs or those who only work on large corporate projects might find
that they take no part in designing the structure of the documents they
write, but I am sure the rest of us take structure very seriously.  I
consider it to be the most critical aspect of a good document. 

(Note that as someone not trained in journalism, I know enough to know that
a journalist writes a long tail so that the editor can trim the article to
any length to fit the space available, without requiring a re-write.  We
would never do that for any other purpose, but it is the normal practice in
journalism for several good reasons. )

Christine

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