In chapter three, the author offers many pieces of advice to consider about audiences in writing. The main point stated by the author is to know the different types of audiences that will be reading your work. While there is an audience that will (hopefully) definitely read your work, there are also additional audiences that may or may not read it. Technical pieces should be focused on the main or primary audience that the piece is intended for, but they should also be understandable for other groups that may read them. Another point the author made about audience is cultural differences. While we, as Americans, believe that our way of doing things is correct, some of our practices can seem offensive to other cultures. It is important to consider that different cultures may read our work and how our work will be viewed differently by various groups.
One thing that I do not agree with in this chapter is the reader analysis charts. I believe that they would definitely help in targeting the primary audience and gearing your writing toward that audience. It may even be helpful for secondary and goalkeeper audiences although to a lesser extent. For tertiary audiences, I believe that it is almost completely useless. As demonstrated by the example of Donald Rumsfeld, it is often impossible to determine who your tertiary audience may be. If you do not know your tertiary audience then it would be impossible to know their needs, values, and attitudes. It would also be impossible to determine their economic, political, and ethical contexts, which makes it very difficult to keep this audience in mind when writing.
Also, I wish that the chapter would have given more helpful tips for writing international pieces. It did a good job of explaining how there are many differences across cultures and gave many examples of what not to do. It also gave some ideas on how to tailor your writing toward specific cultures. However, it did not offer much help on writing pieces that would be geared for all cultures rather than individual ones. This almost implies that writing must be changed and specialized for each group that may use it. I agree with the practice of writing two forms for each piece, one for experienced audiences and one for general audiences, but writing individual works for each culture would be a bit excessive.
Response
I agree that the tertiary reader is nearly impossible to nail down into the reading analysis charts. However, I think the chapter implies that if someone is not a primary/secondary reader or gatekeeping then they would be tertiary. In other words, everyone who has the ability to read or be read to could possibly read your material. I think as a writer one should think specifically about the important and relative groups of tertiary readers if he or she cares about how they are reading the document. For everyone else, they would go in a tertiary group that the writing would not have any impact. The writer would disregard that group from his or her thinking. Although even with this type of thinking you could end up with a countless number of tertiary groups if each have specific needs of the writing. How much you can devote to the tertiary bunch is a give and take, but a writer cannot ignore them.
Shane
Response
I guess what I took away from the reading about the tertiary readers was mainly the point that you need to consider an unintended audience, mainly when your material is of a sensitive or private nature (i.e., the memo from the secretary defense that they never intended for the public to read). You may not necessarily target the tertiary reader or make any decisions about what they want or need as you would for your primary reader, but you need to consider the implications of your writing if someone you didn't intend to read the document were to stumble upon that writing and read it. I had a newspaper adviser once who said you should always think twice about what you write, because once it's in print, it lives forever. I think that's at least part of the point the reading was trying to make about the tertiary reader -- in some situations, you just need to be careful of what you write.
Kristin
Can primary and tertiary audiences be at odds?
Another thing to consider is if primary (and secondary) and tertiary audiences can be at odds. That is to say, perhaps they have such different needs that shaping a document to suit one actually makes it less suited for the other. We might think about the Rumsfeld memo in this context. Is it possible that the kind of language and arrangement strategies that make the document effective for primary and secondary readers also makes it alienating for tertiary readers? To be specific, the book points out that the leaked memo caused a minor controversy because its content was at odds with what the administration was saying publicly about the global war on terror. However, perhaps this difference is the very thing that makes such memos work for their primary and secondary audiences. If the memo repeated the public line, which apparently was erroneous, would the primary and secondary readers feel that it was wasting their time? They are probably aware of the realities of the situation, so it perhaps would be insulting to incorporate content that these audiences know is false. Indeed, if we look at the language choice in the memo, there are a lot of acronyms (DoD, USG) and specific persons and groups (Hekmatyar, Ansar Al-Islam) that would not be familiar to tertiary audiences. As such, it seems like this language is almost like a password or secret handshake to let the primary and secondary audiences know that this material is for them—that they are all in on it and know some things that other people don't. This technique of separating the memo's primary and secondary audiences apart from the masses may have the consequence of alienating tertiary audiences, which is apparently exactly what happened when the memo was leaked. This raises an interesting question: should we write documents like Rumsfeld's that perhaps work very well for primary and secondary audiences but run the risk of failing for tertiary audiences (if they are encountered unexpectedly), or should we always be mindful that anything we write might somehow get out, so we should always produce documents that work for tertiary audiences, even if this means weakening our documents' effectiveness for primary and secondary ones?
Importance of tertiary audiences
I think the importance of writing for a tertiary audience mostly depends on the sensitivity of the information. When this information is very sensitive, such as in the letter from Rumsfeld, it may be better to write separately for the primary/secondary audiences and for the tertiary audience. This way you can tell each separate audience what you want them to know, such as Rumsfeld releasing certain information to the media and then writing private letters to his primary audience. However, this changes the tertiary audience into the primary audience for a separate piece and there is still the risk of the primary document leaking out. I think in some cases it is impossible to keep the tertiary audience in mind and still get your point across to the primary audience. Unfortunately, there are no written rules specifying when the tertiary audience is more important, so this should be decided on a case-by-case basis as these types of things exist on a continuum and cannot be accurately measured.