This chapter was very interesting. I never realized that there was so much to consider about your audience when writing a document. Many valid points are made as to why audience analysis is important and why a document may be totally ignored if certain guidelines aren’t followed. One must take special care when writing a document so that it will be useful to its intended audience, but it will also be informative to its unintended audiences.
The different reader types suggested and the chart that was provided gave me insight into how I should be careful when writing documents in the future. I had never considered the fact that I should format my document for any audience type including secondary and possibly even tertiary readers. Obviously every document should be written with the least amount of unnecessary fluff as possible, but I cannot rely on the common since of the reader to interpret my meaning.'
The attitude of the reader along with the context in which they will be reading a document is also something I have never considered when writing in the past. It is interesting to think about the fact that a reader’s opinion toward my writing may be affected by their current situation. It would be difficult to consider every possible situation that a reader may be in, but for certain types of technical documents such as user manuals, the reader’s situation could be assumed. Political opinions of the reader and myself may be drastically different, thus avoidance of political issues within my documents would most likely always be common practice. The documents I write also should not have any reason to conduce any type of ethical issues, but my own ideals may differ from the readers and problems could arise.
Overall I see that consideration of the reader is extremely important in the writing of any type of document.
Reply
You make a good point of showing how this chapter points out many things that writers should take into consideration. Before reading this chapter, I very rarely considered who would be reading my writings other then my primary audiences. Also I do not think I even considered how important my readers attitudes and beliefs may be or how the context in which my writing was presented could affect how it is interpreted. Overall the chapter did a good job of stressing the importance of knowing your audience before writing something. In the future I know I plan on putting more thought into things like readers attitudes and beliefs and the context in which my work will be read.
Patrick Griffin
pgriffin@purdue.edu
Instructor Feedback
Jason,
We won't reply to all of your Reading Responses, but we think it's important to discuss your first one so that you know if you're on the right track.
In general, you have a provided a good summary of the reading material, but to get full credit you must provide commentary that connects the material with a larger context and shows how it may be
put to use. We want to see you really incorporate the reading into your thinking about technical writing, and the best way to do that is to think of the Reading Response as less a summary than a description of how you will use the reading or how the reading as change your thinking. Keep in mind these bullet points from our "Principles for Reading Responses" handout:
Remember that we all have read the chapter (at least we sure hope we have), so we don't need much summary. What we need is your understanding of how to put the information in motion: What can we do with it? How does it connect to other material inside or outside of class? How does it help us with our current project?
Also, make sure to be specific in your comments. You write: "One must take special care when writing a document so that it will be useful to its intended audience, but it will also be informative to its unintended audiences." What you need to add is an interrogation of the terms you use. That is, what is meant by "useful"? What is the difference between an intended and an unintended audience and how does that difference show up in the document? Also, you should incorporate course/texts terminology wherever possible: we will be using a finer distinction than intended and unintended. You really want to get into the nuts and bolts of how audiences and contexts shape documents, so that means identifying specifics.
Overall, I think your first response is a great start. To get maximum credit going forward, do these things:
effects.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact me through nrivers@purdue.edu.