2.3 Planning Your Message
Sometimes, new communicators will want to start the writing process by deciding what product they want to create. For example, they might want to create an Instagram account to promote the company. If you don’t analyze your context, audience, message and purpose, you could end up choosing the wrong product. Preparation for the writing process involves purpose, research and investigation, reading and analyzing, and adaptation.
To prepare effectively, you should undertake the following steps.
1. Determine the Message’s Purpose
While you may be free to create documents that represent yourself or your organization, your employer will often have direct input into their purpose. All acts of communication have general and specific purposes, and the degree to which you can identify these purposes will influence how effective your writing is. General purposes involve the overall goal of the communication interaction: to inform, persuade, entertain, facilitate interaction, or motivate a reader. The general purpose influences the presentation and expectation for feedback. In an informative message, the most common type of writing in business, you will need to cover several predictable elements:
- Who
- What
- When
- Where
- How
- Why (optional)
Some elements may receive more attention than others, and they do not necessarily have to be addressed in the order you see here. Depending on the nature of your project, as a writer, you will have a degree of input over how you organize them. Note that the last item, Why, is designated as optional. This is because business writing sometimes needs to report facts and data objectively, without making any interpretation or pointing to any cause-effect relationship. In other business situations, of course, identifying why something happened or why a certain decision is advantageous will be the essence of the communication. In addition to its general purpose (e.g., to inform, persuade, entertain, or motivate), every piece of writing also has at least one specific purpose, which is the intended outcome; the result that will happen once your written communication has been read.
2. Analyze your Audience
The audience of any piece of writing is the intended or potential reader or readers. This should be the most important consideration in planning, writing, and reviewing a document. You “adapt” your writing to meet the needs, interests, and background of the readers who will be reading your writing. The principle seems absurdly simple and obvious. It’s much the same as telling someone, “Talk so the person in front of you can understand what you’re saying.” Do we need a course in that? Doesn’t seem like it. But, in fact, lack of audience analysis and adaptation is one of the root causes of most of the problems you find in business documents.
Audiences, regardless of category, must also be analyzed in terms of characteristics such as the following:
- Background knowledge, experience, and training: One of your most important concerns is just how much knowledge, experience, or training you can expect in your readers. Often, business communicators are asked to be clear, but what’s clear to you might not be clear to someone else. For example, imagine that you’re a software developer who’s developing an app for a client. Unfortunately, your code had a number of bugs, which put you behind schedule. If you give a highly technical explanation of why the bugs occurred, you will likely confuse your client. If you simply say “we ran into some bugs,” your client might not be satisfied with the explanation. Your job would be to figure out how much technical knowledge your audience has, then find a way to communicate the problem clearly.
- Needs and interests: To plan your document, you need to know what your audience is going to expect from that document. Imagine how readers will want to use your document and what will they demand from it. For example, imagine you are writing a manual on how to use a new smartphone. What are your readers going to expect to find in it? Will they expect it to be in print or will they look for the information online? Would they rather watch a series of Youtube videos?
- Different cultures: If you write for an international audience, be aware that formats for indicating time and dates, monetary amounts, and numerical amounts vary across the globe. Also, be aware that humour and figurative language (as in “hit a home run”) are not likely to be understood outside of your own culture.
- Other demographic characteristics: There are many other characteristics about your readers that might have an influence on how you should design and write your document, for example, age groups, type of residence, area of residence, gender, political preferences, and so on.
In the workplace, communicators analyze their audience in a number of ways. If your audience is specific (for example, if you’re writing a report to a particular person), you may draw on past experience, ask a colleague, Google the person or even contact them to ask how they would best like the information. If you’re communicating to a large group, you might use analytics, do user testing or run a focus group. Unless your project is important, you may not have time to undertake sophisticated audience analysis. In this case, you should follow the most important maxim of workplace communication: don’t waste people’s time. In general, clear, plain language that is clearly arranged will please most audiences. We’ll talk more about Plain Language in the next chapter.
3. Adapt Your Message
Let’s say you’ve analyzed your audience until you know them better than you know yourself. What good is it? How do you use this information? You can use this information to determine how much information to include or omit from your document, and whether or not it is appropriate to use technical language. For example, if your readers are specialists, you do not need to add as much background information as you would for a non-technical audience. Audience analysis also determines your level of formality. If you are writing to a colleague in another branch, you will probably use a different level of formality compared to when writing a proposal to a potential client.
Analyzing your audience also helps you to determine your primary and secondary audience. Your primary audience is your intended audience; it is the person or people you have in mind when you decide to communicate something. When analyzing your audience you must also be aware of your secondary audience. These are other people you could reasonably expect to come in contact with your message. For example, you might send an email to a customer, who, in this case, is your primary audience, and copy your boss, who would be your secondary audience. If you are responding to the customer’s complaint and your boss is copied on the message, you might include some background information if you boss is not familiar with the situation.
4. Choose Your Medium/Product
Purpose is closely associated with channel. We need to consider the purpose when choosing a channel. From source to receiver, message to channel, feedback to context, environment, and interference, all eight components play a role in the dynamic process. While writing often focuses on an understanding of the receiver (as we’ve discussed) and defining the purpose of the message, the channel—or the “how” in the communication process—deserves special mention.
When is it appropriate to send an instant message or text message versus a conventional email? What is the difference between a letter and a memo? Between a report and a proposal? Writing itself is the communication medium, but each of these specific channels has its own strengths, weaknesses, and understood expectations that are summarized in Activity 2.1.
Activity 2.1 | Communication Channels
Our discussion of communication channels would not be complete without mentioning the issues of privacy and security in electronic communications. Many companies monitor their employees’ electronic communications or Internet use. When you call and leave a voice message for a friend or colleague at work, do you know where your message is stored? It is always wise to consider that any time you send an IM, text, or e-mail or leave a voice message, your message is stored on more than one server, and it can be forwarded to persons other than the intended receiver or can be stored for later retrieval by people for whom your message was not initially intended. Are you ready for your message to be broadcast to the world? Do your words represent you and your business in a positive light? By choosing the correct channel for a message, you can save yourself many headaches and increase the likelihood that your writing will be read, understood, and acted upon in the manner you intended.
In terms of writing preparation, you should review any electronic communication before you send it. Spelling and grammatical errors will negatively impact your credibility. With written documents, we often take time and care to get it right the first time, but the speed of instant messaging, text messaging, or emailing often deletes this important review cycle of written works. Just because the document you prepare in a text message is only one sentence long doesn’t mean it can’t be misunderstood or expose you to liability. Take time when preparing your written messages, regardless of their intended presentation, and review your work before you click “send.”