This is a transcript of one of the videos in the plain language training course Writing well at work. There are references to slides and visual material that are only available by viewing the video.
You can access the full web based course at writertraining.online.
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Understanding the person you are writing for
Well, I hope answering those questions was beneficial and gave you a bit of an insight into what’s going on for your user.
What we’re trying to do here is to understand the person or the head that we’re trying to convey this information to.
Now I’d have to say that there is a couple of things that make answering these questions a bit difficult.
What if you don’t know your user well?
The first one is, sometimes we just don’t know a user as well as we would like to, and so answering these questions can be difficult.
Well, what can you do when you don’t know the answer?
Well, clearly one thing you can do is you can ask and there’s a whole bunch of people you might be able to talk to to get a bit of insight into your user. You can talk to your colleagues, you can talk to your boss if you have access to them.
You might even be able to talk directly with your user, the person you are writing the document for. You might want to reframe these questions, but you can have that type of conversation. To figure out what’s important to them and what they need in the document.
If you’re writing a significant document for the public, you might want to even commission some genuine user research before you start writing so that you can uncover people’s attitudes and their existing knowledge. That type of thing, that’s a possibility for some documents.
The other thing you can do when you don’t know the answer is you can guess. Now these aren’t going to be random stupid guesses. Let’s call them assumptions. You can make some assumptions for what’s going on for people, and because they are assumptions, sometimes you’ll get it right, and sometimes you’ll get it wrong. And if your documents not working in the way that you would like it to, maybe you need to go back and revisit those assumptions.
But just doing some serious thinking about what’s going on for your. User you will have enough insight already to make some sound judgments about what’s going on, even though they are assumptions.
Multiple audiences can be tricky
The other thing that makes answering these questions difficult is sometimes we have more than one user and so we might need to do this type of thinking for multiple users for multiple audiences. That just makes the work a little bit longer and a bit more extended, but it is still a really valuable thing to do.
Make sure you understand your user.
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