Chapter 3 of Readers and Context of Use shows how useful knowing your audience can be in your writings. By doing a little research and planning ahead of time, it can make your writing much more understandable and effective in getting your goals across. The reading also points out the importance of thinking about all your potential readers and not only focusing on the primary audience. It also expands on that by explaining how you can use the knowledge you gained from your research in order to meet the needs and expectations of not only your primary audience but also the rest of your readers as well. Chapter 3 also did a good job of showing the difficulties with communicating across different cultures, and the importance of knowing you audience in these situations. By researching the differences in cultures you can ensure that anything you write will be effective in reaching all the target audiences no matter their culture or location.
The reading seemed to focus on the idea that how your writing is presented can be just as important as what your writing is actually presenting. Knowing your audiences and the best way to present your writing to them is extremely important to technical writing. By knowing your audiences culture and keeping in mind all the different audiences that may read your writing helps ensure you will be able to plan correctly. Properly planning and presenting your writing can help in many ways, from avoiding potentially embarrassing situations to increasing the effectiveness of your writing and making sure your point was well received and understood. By doing your research and taking the time to plan and develop your writing accordingly you can ensure it provide the people it needs to with the right information in a concise, helpful, and most importantly, effective way.
response
I will agree, looking at your response, that planning ahead and having a systematic way to research and write your letters while presenting your information to come across clearly with your ideas. I was never really a person who wrote from more than the primary audiences. But as your saying in your response; that taking into consideration the secondary and the tertiary audiences for understanding the information that you are presenting in a letter. This I feel is an important concept to help other groups of people to become interested in a specific topic that you are trying to convey. I feel that after looking at this chapter that my writing will become more open than just to my primary audience.
Zebulon Rouse