Technical writing for transportation professionals
By Richard Kronick, freelance technical writer and writing trainer
I have been a technical writer specializing in transportation issues for 20 years and a teacher of technical writing for 22 years. So, when asked to write a series of how-to articles on technical writing for transportation professionals, I knew right away that my first topic should be Rule #1 for tech writers:
Rule #1: Get to know your readers and their needs. But then I realized it would be ironic if I didn’t practice what I preach. So I asked a couple of experienced civil engineers who are good writers what they see as the biggest writing problems among their colleagues. The one thing both of them mentioned was “not writing for the reader.” That settled it!
The School Writing Trap
The problem of not writing for the reader sneaks up on you during your school years. For each high school and college assignment, it was obvious that your audience was one person—your teacher or professor. In most cases, this was someone you knew pretty well—someone with whom you had a face-toface relationship. But now that you’re in business or government, you are in a totally different situation. Though you often address a business document to just one person, everything from a major proposal to a quick e-mail is read by more than one person. Furthermore, readers other than the one addressed are often crucially important to your success. For example, an RFP may tell you to direct your proposal to one person, but in most cases it will be several other people who actually decide who gets the project. And yet, if you don’t stop to think carefully about who these important readers are, there’s a strong tendency to act as though you were still in college writing for the single, obvious audience. I call this the School Writing Trap.
Map your audiences
For most work-related documents, you know either the names—or at least the job descriptions—of your readers. So, to avoid the School Writing Trap, get into the habit of listing your audiences as the first step in writing every business document. Actually, the best way is to map your audiences. For example, let’s say you’re a county engineer writing a proposal for a new highway department building. Your audience map might look like the example.
By taking a minute to create this map, you forcefully remind yourself that your audience is more numerous and more complex than the five county commissioners. And as soon as you see this reality, you will undoubtedly begin thinking about how different these people are from each other. This is what makes writing at work so hard! You only get to write the document once, but you have to communicate to all these different people simultaneously. Just the fact that you take one minute to map out your audiences will serve you well. You will begin to strategize about important aspects of writing such as order of presentation, tone of voice, and degree of detail.
Categorize your audiences
The next step in getting to know your readers is to categorize them. At the most fundamental level, readers fall into three categories:
- Primary audiences: Those who make decisions based on your document.
- Secondary audiences: Those who are affected by the decisions of the primary audiences.
- Intermediary audiences: Those who merely pass your document on to someone else.
Primary audiences
By definition, primary audiences are the people who have the power to decide how to respond to your document. This gets at a fundamental truth about technical writing, which is that the purpose of every document is to motivate someone to do something. (The next article in this series will focus in more detail on defining your purpose.) For the document described above—the proposal for a new county highway building—certainly the county board members are primary audiences. But what about their spouses? If they read and discuss the proposal with the commissioners, they become “secret” primary audience members because they will influence the board members’ action—or inaction.
Let’s also look at a second example. Say you’re that same county highway engineer, but now you’re writing a procedure for the road maintenance workers who report to you. For this document, those workers are the primary audience. The decision they will make is whether or not to follow your procedure. My point here is that you should not assume that “decision maker” always means a higher-up person. Your primary audience can be anyone; it depends on the type of document you’re writing.
Secondary audiences
Secondary audiences are those readers who are not in the “driver’s seat.” In other words, they don’t get to make a decision based on what you have written, the way primary audiences do. Instead, secondary audiences are directly affected by the decisions made by primary audience members. So, in the first example above (proposal for a new facility), if the county board gives you the “thumbs up” response, the consulting architect is one of several people who will be directly affected by the board’s decision. In the second example (work procedure), if the road maintenance workers don’t understand or don’t agree with your procedure, their boss (the maintenance supervisor) is directly affected. In fact, in this second example, the maintenance supervisor is probably both a primary and a secondary audience. In real life, everything is complicated!
For each work-related document that you write, you have both primary and secondary audiences— and it’s very much to your advantage if you identify them and think about these important differences before you begin writing.
Intermediary audiences
“Intermediary” is a fancy word for a “pass-through” person. I’m sure you’ve encountered this many times: You address a document to someone—say a boss—but you know the boss is only going to look at your document for a minute and then forward it to someone else with a Post-it that says, “Jane, please take care of this.” If all the boss does is send the document down the org chart to Jane, then you’re really writing to her. But documents can also be passed up the org chart. For example, you may address a document to an administrative assistant, knowing full well that he or she will only look at your document for a moment—and then put it in the boss’s in-basket. You’ll want to identify any intermediary audiences for a given document—so you can disregard them. This is a good thing; it’s complicated enough to write to your primary and secondary audiences!
It will take you no more than a minute to categorize your audiences into these three important categories—but it’s very much worth your while.
Analyze your audiences
The third and last part of getting to know your readers is to analyze them. After mapping and categorizing, pick out the most important audience members and, for each one, answer these questions, which I have adapted from the book, Persuasive Business Writing by Mary Cross:
Personal factors
- Job title, department, responsibilities?
- Length of time with the organization?
- Educational background?
- Age and gender?
- Politics, attitudes?
- Knowledge factors?
- How well does the reader know you?
- What does the reader already know about the subject?
- What else does the reader need to know?
Time factors
- When will the reader read this message?
- How much time will the reader spend on it?
- Is there a deadline by which the reader must act?
Organizational factors
- Where is this reader on the org chart?
- Where is most of the reader’s work done? (at a desk? in the field?)
- Who will this reader confer with before acting?
Attitudinal factors
- How interested is the reader in the arrival of this message?
- How will the reader feel about it? (good news? bad news?)
- How will the reader’s job be affected by this message?
Small investment—big payoff
Reading this article may have taken you 15 minutes. But doing what I have recommended will take you no more than five minutes, once you’ve tried it a few times. And you probably don’t need to write down any of it; just do it in your head. Five minutes is a small investment of your time, but it will pay off mightily in the quality of your business writing. When you have mapped, categorized, and analyzed your audiences, you automatically will have developed a sophisticated strategy that will serve as the foundation for each document. As a result, you’re likely to actually convince people to do what you want them to do!
I’d love to hear from you about how it worked.
Richard Kronick is a freelance technical writer and writing trainer specializing in transportation, civil engineering, and architecture. He has presented more than 1,000 business writing and technical writing seminars around the world. He can be reached at www.richardlkronick.com.