Know what your audience already knows

At the core of your ability to communicate effectively in writing is understanding your audience, and the first thing you need to understand about your audience is what they already know about your topic.

Cooking popcorn across the room

Consider that you work for an appliance company in their engineering department, and your team has just finalized new technology that can microwave popcorn from across the room, safely, in half the time of the old way of microwaving in a small, closed appliance.

You’ve been asked to help the company explain the new technology to its customers, primarily appliance re-manufacturers and industrial consumers. You target several industry conferences and trade publications for a series of articles about the breakthrough and how it can be deployed in next generation consumer products.

Reaching a technical audience

In these venues you can be fairly sure that audience members are in your industry and knowledgeable about at least the basics of how the current generation of microwaves work, or they wouldn’t be in a position to be exposed to the very trade-specific venues you’ve targeted for publication. For these audiences you can probably dispense with introductory and background material describing how microwaves work now, and move straight into your approach and the ways it will revolutionize the consumer experience in the future. Your articles are fairly technical, with little of the “basics,” and a fair amount of industry jargon.

Explaining it to your mom

You are successful, and your documents generate a buzz in the industry. The consumer-appliance industry licenses your technology, and they begin announcing products based on your team’s designs. Now the consumer press gets interested, and you get a call from the New York Times to provide technical information for a short piece they are doing in their consumer-electronics section of the Sunday edition.

Now who is your audience? You probably can’t assume the reader knows anything about how microwaves currently work, so that’s background you’re going to have to provide. The technical aspects of your design are going to have to be watered down to simple block diagram concepts, and you’ll have to dispense with the industry jargon completely.

These changes are necessary because this new audience doesn’t share the technical background of your industry, and in order to communicate with them you have to provide them explicitly with the context and concepts in ways that they can understand.

On the other hand, maybe you shouldn’t talk about how microwaves work at all. My mom wouldn’t give a hoot about how the technology involved is 10x better than the old way of doing it. What she’ll care about is that she can cook popcorn from across the room right in the bowl she’ll be eating out of without getting up.

Change your approach based on what they already know

How you approach your topic really depends on what your audience needs to know and is capable of consuming given prior knowledge, training, and experience. What they need to know depends on what they are going to do with the information you are giving them, and that’s our topic for next time.