The focus of chapter 3 was on understanding your readers and how they will use your content. The chapter contained a couple charts that can be used to properly identify your audience. One of these charts included three key items when considering a reader’s perspective. These three items are needs, values and attitudes. It is important to know what type of needs your audience has to know how to better address them. Knowing your audience’s values will help you to better understand how important they think your topic is. Your audience’s attitude has a direct impact on how they will perceive your writing. If your audience is hostile towards your topic this is important to know this so you can approach your writing from a common ground.
I discovered that the writer-centered analysis chart was one of the key parts of the chapter. Before reading this chapter I used to think some about the primary readers, secondary readers and gatekeepers but never about the tertiary readers. I found it interesting that you should also consider tertiary people in your writing. I would have never thought about how you should consider them even though they are not your intended audience. I felt that the Donald Rumsfeld memo was a great example of how tertiary readers may read your writing.
A large part of chapter 3 covered the importance of proper communication across diverse cultures. I feel that this part of the chapter is very relevant to our ever quickly growing society. As the technology increases it is becoming increasingly easier to communicate and conduct business with clients in other nations and cultures. Communication is the key to success for multi-cultural businesses. I learned from the chapter that cultures have many differences in content, organization and style. Understanding these differences is very important to communicate effectively to your audience.
Response
I think you hit the nail on the head in your third paragraph which talked about intercultural communication. Technology today plays a big part in this because of the ease of communicating to far away places. You can communicate to people on the other side of the world in just a matter of seconds, which means more people will now do so more frequently. Not only does technology make it easy to communicate long distances in short amounts of time, but it can also be used to help translate between different languages. The technology aspect of this is the easy part of intercultural communication. The hard part is knowing how to write what you are saying in a manner that the other cultures can understand. This doesn’t just pertain to language translation but also language structure and the physical layout of your writing.
Bobby
The tertiary reader is sort
The tertiary reader is sort of interesting, in a way the idea of it is almost enigmatic. It is at least partially impractical to write technical documents with these readers in mind. Doing so will detract from the real purpose of writing the document in the first place-the primary reader. However, as the example points out, completely ignoring a possible tertiary reader is to be avoided. It may be wise, with this in mind, to consider tertiary readers in terms of content of what is written as opposed to how that information is presented, although it may be difficult if not impossible to anticipate tertiary readers like those from the text. As far as differences in culture, the text does not do justice to all of the variances present among all regions and countries, but it's a start.
Response
I agree with your point about the tertiary readers. I also feel that it is near impossible to write for the tertiary audience. This audience is extremely large, as you never know what type of group may come across your writing. To try and keep all of these potential readers in mind when writing means that important information meant for your primary reader will have to be modified or left out. I agree that this audience should not be forgotten but your primary audience should be considered first above all tertiary groups that the writing is not intended for. I also agree with your comment about cross-cultural writing. The text gives some guidelines to follow, but these will not cover all situations, especially when writing for multiple countries or cultures at one time.
With the increasing amount of
With the increasing amount of cross cultural business deals communication is key, and like mentioned in this response it is very important when making business deals that communication be easy and understandable. Forms of communication in the United States are are very different than in other countries, for example China, and when making business transactions effective communication makes the businesses run a lot smoother. A good technical writer must study, and understand how to properly communicate to other cultures.