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.
Information about face to face courses is at thinkwrite.com.au
Well, let’s turn our attention to the other side of those arrows and think about what’s going on for our user.
The better you know your reader or user, the more effective your document will be
So here’s a bunch of questions that you can use to start to think about what’s going on for your user. They’re not an exhaustive list, but you might want to think about what are their needs and desires and their fears.
Thinking about their fears might be an interesting one. I mean, if you were writing a document for a government. Think about what are the things that they fear, and largely that will be around being embarrassed by the media or not getting re-elected. That type of thing. I’m not suggesting that you write solely for fears, but do keep those in mind as you think through with the content that you might be providing for your user.
Another question, what do they already know or think they know? Because sometimes what people think they know and what they actually know can be a little bit different. So it’s worthwhile thinking about that.
What do they think of you? That might sound initially to be an odd question, but it’s it’s a worthwhile perspective to have a bit of a think through. What do people think of you? If you’re writing an internal document, it might actually be what do people think about you personally or about the section that you’re a part of? If you’re writing a document that’s going outside the organisation? You might want to apply your mind to what do people think about this organisation, because that’s going to influence how they’re going to receive that document.
Also, think about why they’d be interested in this. What’s their purpose in reading?
There are other things you can think about, things like their comfort with the written word, the literacy levels that would be useful.
Ultimately, you also need to think about what do they need to do with this information. How are they going to need to use that?
Well, I’m going to stop the video now. I’m going to ask you to answer those questions for this document that you’ve brought with you to this course, the one that you need to write in the next few weeks or so.
Access the complete course at writertraining.online