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.
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Now I do want to talk about this document from a structural perspective, but just before we get there, let me just pose a few questions for you to think through.
The first one is what was that like to to read? Did you enjoy it? Was it pleasurable? Most people say it was a bit of a grind to get through it.
I’ll also ask if I hadn’t asked you to read that document, do you think you would have read it? And again, most people respond with no, they probably wouldn’t have. It’s not that engaging to read.
I’m gonna ask, well, what do you think the author wants you to do now that you have read that document? Hmm. And most people say, yeah, look, that’s a little bit unclear, even though I’ve got those five steps to better air towards the end of the document, it’s still not really clear what they want me to do.
And then I also ask, well, who do you think it was written for? As you start reading the document, you think it’s probably written for you and people like you, people who breathe indoor air. But then you get to the end of the document and you see these steps towards better air and they’re not things that you can do. So you start to wonder, well, maybe I’m not part of the audience. Maybe the audience is for regulators or somebody like that. We can’t implement these changes
And then I ask, well, is this document total rubbish? And the answer to that is no, it’s not. It contains some really important information. It’s got some really good ideas in there. It’s not rubbish. There’s some important stuff there we need to pay attention to.
It seems to me that this is a document that’s been written without much thought about PAM: purpose, audience and message. And so we end up with a whole bunch of information that is good and helpful and important. But it’s not put together in a way that engages the reader or helps them move towards responding in some way.
Anyway, I did want to talk about this document from a structural perspective. What you’re seeing on the screen now is a summary of all the paragraphs in that fact sheet. I’ve just tried to capture what’s in each paragraph with just a handful of words, so we start with a quote and definition, cost and no framework, an being worse than outside air. It talks about the sources, it talks about those really dangerous activities that increase concentration, things like cooking and cleaning. Yeah, it won’t be doing too much of that. Talks about age and maintenance, outdoor movement and pressure exchange rate, how we need to pay attention when we’re building and it goes on to the impacts. Then we’ve got these 6 steps to better air, and a section on further reading and a quote.
What I’d like you to do is to have a go at reorganising this content so that it is more suitable for the user.
Now you’ve got a word file in this unit. I’ll get you to open that up now. And as you do, if you can go to the outline view which allows you to move paragraphs up and down really easily. The first thing I’d like you to do is to reorganise this content for the public for people who breathe indoor air, see if you can reorganise that content so it is suitable for that audience. And you don’t need to keep everything that’s in there at the moment. You can remove some content if you would like. So pause this video now to have a go at that and then come back in just a moment.
All right, the second audience, I’d like you to have a go at reorganising this content for is for government regulators, people who are able to do some of those things under the six steps to better air. So have a go at reorganising the content from that perspective and again you don’t need to keep everything. So pause the video now and have a go at that.
All right, as you organise that content for those different audiences, I’m pretty sure that you will have come up with a different structure for each of those audiences. There may be some overlap and a little bit of, you know, similarity between the two structures.
But typically what people do when they reorganise this content for the public, when the public are the users, people who breathe indoor air. They’ll probably start with a closing quote that’s far better than the opening quote, and then they’ll want to talk about health impacts, and they’ll talk about activities that increase concentration because those are the things that are most relevant to that user.
When they’re writing for regulators, typically what they’ll do is they’ll bring up information around the definition and they’ll talk about cost and no framework framework, and they’ll bring up those 6 steps to better air, because that is of more relevance to that audience.
So the point of this exercise is even though we’ve got identical content to start with, we will end up with a different document structure depending on our user.
We are always going to organise our content for our user, with them in mind.
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