English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

Chapter 3’s focus on the target audiences and contexts of technical writing made me view some of my personal experiences and writing techniques from a new perspective. Personally I’ve dealt with technical writing in past job experiences and even in a global team. Both the idea of adequately targeting all ends of your audience and writing in the appropriate context has made me evaluate the way I write.

First, I found it interesting how the chapter explains the different audiences. It’s obviously a little challenging to write something that would target all ends, but not impossible I suppose. As we saw in the Donald Rumsfeld example, a piece of literary work can be interpreted in many different ways. Although his letter was aimed mainly at the primary audience, when it was in the hands of the tertiary audience it was viewed in a whole different matter. Reading this made me notice that no matter what the primary audience may be, you should consider all audiences that the literary piece may be interpreted by. One of the most important techniques in persuasion is adequately evaluating your audiences Beliefs attitudes and values. Taking these three factors into consideration can immensely alter how effective your writing is. Most people will consult a piece of technical writing for a solution. With this the problem (need or desire) in mind the writer must produce a valuable solution. Evaluating the need and solution leads to a more concise and ample piece of work.

As for the context, this seemed to be just as much of a consideration as your audience. Even if you take your audiences into full consideration your writing still won’t be ample. Writers must consider physical, economic, political and ethical contexts. When I worked on a global team this past summer I communicated regularly with people all over the world. The vast backgrounds and viewpoints of many different people make technical writing a challenge sometimes. Half way around the world many of the viewpoints on these contexts are very different, yet must be taken into account in order to effectively get your point across. I specifically remember one email I wrote this summer outlining some technical instructions I wrote for someone in Budapest. I quickly ran into a roadblock when I didn’t take both my audience and context into much consideration. I quickly received a reply boldly stating “that’s not how we execute procedures over here”. While the context of this statement can be interpreted different ways, in this case it was a matter of economic contexts. I quickly discovered that due to economic reasons some tasks that may be executed one way here in the States, due to economic reasons they were executed in different more efficient manner halfway across the world.

The author’s most important point to me was the idea that most readers “Raid” for information. I believe by taking the audiences and context into consideration the information will be presented in a proper fashion so the writing will be easy to graze through and get the most important information.

I’m continually working on improving my writing. This reading has broadened my ideas and techniques on how I can attack my text technical writing work. Hopefully now I won’t receive anymore negative emails as outlined above anymore when I take these factors into consideration more.