6 The concept of purpose in professional documents
ON PURPOSE, SITUATION, AND CONTEXT
Purpose, situation, context, and the related rhetorical concepts of exigency and rhetorical situation may be new to you as major considerations in professional writing. This is partly due to writing in school tending to be expository, that is writing whose purpose is to show (expose) your knowledge, skills and opinions. A fourth grade composition on “My Trip to the Zoo,” or a high school book report on To Kill a Mockingbird, or an answer to an American history essay question, or a college essay on whether motorcyclists should be required to wear helmets, or a Ph.D. dissertation on flower imagery in Shakespeare’s comedies, all have this one thing in common. They present information, and they often focus on a thesis, opinion or argument. In other words, expository writing may simply give information, or it may employ that information as evidence, explanation, or illustration to support a thesis.
Those two purposes—presenting information and presenting an argument or thesis—is a large part of academic writing. Professional communication, however, very often also involves a different consideration—to achieve a purpose, to accomplish a goal, to persuade or allow the audience to act. The reader of a professional report most often reads with a view to acting. In the professional world it’s often the central reason for creating a professional document.
Consider the purpose, say, of a job application letter or resume. Or a corporation’s proposal to a government agency from which your company seeks a contract. Or a lawyer’s brief to a judge supporting a motion to dismiss the case against her client. Or a report to your vice president requesting funding for new equipment. Or a notice to your staff about a new corporate policy the staff must follow regarding contract changes.
To accomplish something always requires that we take the context and situation into account. Professional communication, as one writer put it, is triggered by circumstances, by “an imperfection marked by urgency.” There’s “a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing that is other than it should be,” and communication is the way of finding and implementing the needed change.1 These are the exigencies within which the writer works. The extent to which the writer must persuade the reader to act is the rhetorical situation in which a writer is communicating.
A professional report is instrumental—a means of helping or persuading the reader to accomplish something. Hence the focus of professional communication should be on the reader’s professional interests, on the professional relation of the writer and reader, and on the action or response that the reader wants to take, or should take.
Writing guidelines: purpose
1. Have your purpose clearly in mind before you start to develop the report. Note that this doesn’t say that you should have your subject in mind. The subject and the purpose for writing about that subject are two different things, and they should not be confused.
2. State the purpose (1) precisely, and (2) in audience response language. Since the purpose is the reason the report exists, and the reason for the audience to read it, it’s crucial to make it very clear. Readers should never be confused or mystified about why they’re reading a professional report. If you don’t use audience-response language, you’re not stating a purpose.
3. Focus throughout on the purpose. By “focus” (a term we’ll use often) we mean connect clearly everything in the report to the purpose.
