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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Selecting the type of communication product
What you should have at this stage is a couple of mind maps that have explored all the content that could end up in the document, and you’ve prioritised those so you know what some of the more important ideas are and what some of the lesser ideas are.
Now that you have that content, it’s now time to think about, how can we structure and organise that content.
But just before we get there, I think it’s helpful to just do a quick check and think through what it is that you really need to produce. You’re going to produce an information product, what type of product is best suited to your communication needs?
A document or something else?
So it seems to me one of the ways that we could divide up information products is we could say we might have a document or maybe it’s something that’s not a document.
If it’s a document, it’s something that’s going to be read primarily. If it’s not a document, it might be something that is viewed or listened to, or maybe experienced. So we need to make a decision between those two things.
So if it’s a document, it could be any one of these types of documents you see on the screen. This will be something that is primarily going to be read. It could be a fact sheet or a briefing note or a letter or a poster, report, business case, web text, all those sorts of things. And of course those documents might include other type of media. They might include some graphs and some photos and that type of thing. But primarily it’s a document. And it all is all about being read.
But you might decide that after you’ve done all this thinking about your purpose, audience, and message, and after you’ve explored the content that actually something different might be a better way of communicating. So it might be that it’s not a document.
You might decide that communicating this information might be better as a presentation on maybe a series of photographs. Or perhaps you’ll make a video. Oh, maybe you’ll just pick up the phone and talk to somebody. Or perhaps there’s a meeting or a discussion of some sort. Or you might even create a discussion space. So all of these things are things that we primarily watch or listen to or experience.
You might not have seen discussion spaces before, so let me just show you a quick example of. This is a project I was involved in some years ago. It was all about consolidating companies for the purposes of income tax. What we did here is we created a whole series of panels that provided information. It was about having people come and talk through what’s going on. We provided some information on the panels, but they had other experts there who had talked through some of the implications of that information. So that’s just another way of communicating important content.
Factors to keep in mind when deciding the type of communication product
So in coming to that decision on what to produce, there’s a few factors to keep in mind.
Firstly, it will be influenced by your purpose. You’ve likely already thought that through fairly thoroughly.
It will also be influenced by your constraints. You will have some constraints around time and money. You may really think a discussion space would be a great thing to build, but you don’t have the time and you don’t have the money to do that.
There could be some other constraints your organisation may have said, hey, this needs to be a briefing note. All right. You’ve been given that direction, you are now working within that constraint.
Other things to consider are what’s going on for your user, your user’s purpose in engaging with this communication product, and also your users situation as they do engage with it.
Consider what’s happening for your user
Just a few questions as we’re thinking through your users’ purpose. Do they want instructions so that they can complete a task? Is that what they’re after? Or do they need to decide whether or not to do something? Is that primarily what’s going on for them? Or maybe they’re just trying to understand this topic. Or perhaps they want to find out what you want them to do. So this is an instructional piece. They want to know exactly how they should respond, what they need to do for you. Or maybe they’re just learning about some area of interest. Or maybe it’s a bit more deliberate. They might have a specific need to get a driver’s licence, for example. So they need knowledge for that. Or maybe they’re just building on existing.
Your users could be coming to your communication product for any one of those reasons, and perhaps others as well. So think through the user’s purpose as you are making this decision about what type of communication product it is, what type of information product that you’re going to build.
Also think through your users’ situation. Is this information product something you’re going to give them hand to them, or do they need to search it out somewhere, find it on the Internet or something? Also think through where they will be as they’re using, or perhaps reading this product and what sort of technology will they have as they engage with your communication product.
For example, some years ago I was doing some work with for the Food authority and we wanted to provide information for fishers, information that they would take out on the boat. For them, a 500 page paper manual is not going to work in that type of environment, so we need to think about some other way of providing that information.
So think about how much time they will have and whether they’re going to be able to stay focused and how interested that they will be in the topic. And also think through what their emotional state might be as they are encountering this information product. That can be particularly important if you’re writing health related information.
So you would consider all those things and then figure out what might be the best way of delivering this information to my user.
Now for our purposes, I’m going to assume that you’ve decided it’s a document of some sort. And of course, there are other issues to consider as well.
You’ll need to think about access and making sure that communication gets noticed and read. You also need to think about control. You need to make sure the message is not going to be modified or misused in any way – that could be a bit of an issue if you decide that social media is the best way of communicating.
You may also need to keep in mind things around production, designing things and getting it approved and getting it printed.
Consider what else is out there
Also give some thought to what else is out there. Are there other organisations who are publishing information about the topic that you want to talk about? Do you need to modify your content or the way you’re talking about it to perhaps align or augment what they are saying? Or perhaps there’s some content on the Internet that’s maybe not quite right, and you may need to correct that. So looking at the environment in which you’re operating will not only give you some additional information when you are thinking about what type of communication product to make, but it may also mean that you need to go back and do some more thinking about the content that you need to include in this communication piece.
So you think through what type of communication product you’re going to build by considering your purpose and the constraints that you’re working in, as well as the reader’s purpose and the situation that they’re going to encounter this in.
So for our purposes in the remainder of this course, I’m going to assume that you’ve decided that you needed a document of some sort.
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