Blog Post 4 – Audience
To: Jan Doe, Supervisor
From: Eric Cole
Subject: Audience Analysis
Date: 12/16/2015
In my technical communications course I learned three ways to analyse the audience of a document to effectively communicate my message. The three ways are to create personas, scenarios and the context of the document.
- To create a persona I imagine a fictional person that I intend to read my document. I give each person an age range, a title, an occupation, a reason for reading my document and most importantly a class. There are four different classes of readers, primary, secondary, tertiary and gatekeepers. Each class has a specific reason for reading the document and each get something different from the document. The primary audience is the audience the document is directly intended for and are taking the information from the document and using it. Here at MidAmerican Energy that would most likely be the customer or a co-worker. The secondary audience are people who read the document to help the primary audience better understand it’s content. Examples of secondary readers are customer technicians who answer customer questions or a contractor who helps the linemen construct what is designed. Next is the tertiary audience, they are people who evaluate the documents contents. In my position my tertiary audience would consist of fellow engineers, government officials, and environmental specialists. Finally the last type of audience are the gatekeepers who are people that have to a approve a document before it can be used. Here at MidAmerican that would be you or even your superiors. Creating personas is an effective way for me to understand my audience who they are and how they will be viewing my document.
- Another way I improve my understanding of audience is to create a scenario. To create a scenario I imagine one of my persona’s uses of my document. I try to understand what they would use my document for and how I could make it easier for the them to use in the situation. An example scenario might be a lineman who is attempting to understand a design I made but doesn’t know what all the symbols mean. I can help him out by adding a legend to my design and annotation to any parts that are more challenging or specific things need to happen.
- Finally analysing the context in which the document is presented can help the audience understand the document better. I the writer need to understand how my document will be presented the reader. For example if the document is electronic I should add links and other interactive parts to my document that would not normally appear in a hard copy. I also need to consider other contextual issue like political, economical, and ethical context. As an engineer I need to make sure that everything I produce is ethical and economical and I also need to consider if there are any political implications. An example may be installing a wind turbine, is it ethically okay to possibly damage land or wildlife, is it economically possible to produce energy from a wind turbine and finally are there any laws or politics against building a wind turbine? All of these questions need to be considered and answered.
For this course I made a professional portfolio website. I intend to use this website to show potential employers my projects and skills, making my primary audience my future employer. My future employer needed to be able to see the contents of my site and navigate it easily and quickly. Do make my site appealing I have a main page with slider sections showcasing my work with easy links to the more in-depth information. The other type of audience my website is made specifically for is the gatekeeper. In this case that would be my professor. I had certain requirements that the portfolio had to cover and show to the gate keeper. These parts of my site are also easy to find and are designed to help my professor easily see my work and the improvement I made over the semester.
Through an internship at MidAmerican Energy I learned how to analyze my audience and learned what groups needed certain information and what other groups did not need. For underground cable replacement jobs I learned that the lineman who actually did the job needed specific instructions on where to put the cable, how deep to run it and what needed replacing. Whereas the accountant needed to know the types of materials, and the quantities or length of the materials. And still the government officials needed to know where we were building or digging in order to get approval for the projects. The most valuable thing I learned about audience while working at MidAmerican is there are a lot of different audiences I needed to write to and contact in order to complete a job, each with different specific needs. It took my skill in audience analysis to properly be able to understand and predict what each audience would need.
