2. Audience and Purpose

The audience of a technical writing—or any piece of writing—is the intended or potential reader or readers. This is the most important consideration in planning, writing, and reviewing a document. You “adapt” your writing to meet the purposes, interests, and background of the readers who will be reading your writing. In reality, the lack of audience analysis and adaptation is a major cause of most of the problems in professional, technical documents.

Note: Once you’ve read this chapter on audiences, try using the audience planner. You fill in blanks with answers to questions about your audience and then e-mail it to yourself and, optionally, to your instructor. Use the audience planner for any writing project as a way of getting yourself to think about your audience in detail.