Determine your purpose
So you’ve taken some time to reflect on your context and understand your audience. Now what?
The third step in the CAP analysis process is to determine your purpose (the ‘P’ in CAP analysis). Simply put, this means asking yourself, why am I writing this message? What am I trying to achieve?
In their book The Essentials of Technical Communication, Elizabeth Tebeaux and Sam Dragga note that in the workplace, you “write to create change” (2014). Maybe you want to change something small, like having your coworker send you a file, or maybe you want to make a big change, like convincing another company to buy goods or services from you or ensuring that your team follows new health and safety guidelines. Every piece of writing in the workplace should exist for a reason. Effective writers understand why they are writing and communicate this purpose clearly to their audience.
To complete the ‘P’ in the CAP analysis of a message, you’ll need to know how to identify the general, specific, and underlying purposes of your writing. Read on to learn more.
Identifying general, specific, and underlying purposes
When writing messages, your purpose will vary depending on the situation and audience. Additionally, whether you realize it or not, you’ll likely have more than one purpose for writing. For most professional messages, the purpose can be divided into three aspects: general purpose, specific purpose, and underlying purpose. By considering these three aspects together, you can craft your message more effectively for maximum impact.
The general purpose of a message is the big-picture end-goal of communication such as aiming to inform, persuade, motivate, or entertain your audience. The hope is that your audience correctly understands the information in your message and is persuaded to support an idea, is motivated to follow an action, or is amused. For example, imagine that you are writing the president of the college asking them to expand the food options on campus. The general purpose of your message would be to persuade the president to consider your request and take action on it.
The specific purpose of a message always depends on the situation. In the example given above, if the general purpose of the message is to persuade, then the specific purpose might be to highlight the need for additional food services on campus and the benefits that it can bring to the student body and the college as a whole. You might provide the president with a written record of the food offerings at other comparable colleges, results of a student survey demonstrating the need for more food offerings, and a break down of the budget so that the president can decide if your idea is reasonable. Additionally, you may address any potential objections or concerns that the president may have and offer solutions to address these issues.
In professional and academic settings, all messages also have important underlying or additional purposes: first, ensuring that you are making a positive impression on your audience, and second, ensuring that you are maintaining goodwill, or a friendly, positive relationship, between you and your audience. As a student writing to the president of the college, you would definitely want to edit your message carefully to ensure that the content and tone your message showcases what a diligent and considerate student you are!
As representatives of companies and organizations, it’s especially important that professional employees and leaders leave their audience thinking positively of them, as this will impact not just what the audience will think of them personally, but also how much the audience will trust and respect their organization. This is particularly important when the audience is potential customers, clients, or partners.
With every message you write both professionally and in college, it’s wise to think carefully about how you would like your audience to view you and how you would like future interactions with them to go.
Using the 5Ws + H questions in determining your purpose
The most common general purpose of a workplace message is to inform. Most emails and reports cover a topic thoroughly and precisely with subtopics based on the 5 Ws + H: who, what, where, when, why, how.
How much space and emphasis you give to each subtopic – or whether a subtopic needs to be included at all – depends on the situation. Sometimes explaining the why of your message isn’t important, but other times it is crucial. For instance, consider an email by a construction contractor responding to a customer who wants to get their bathroom renovated. A thorough response from the contractor would include details such as what exactly would need to be done and how (a labour itemization as part of the price estimate), how many workers would be assigned to the job (the who), and how long it would take (the when). Additionally, the customer would also want to know how much the renovation would cost. Details such as the where and why are already given (e.g., the bathroom is being renovated because it is 25 years out of style and the baseboards are mouldy), so these subtopics could be left out of the email.
Key Takeaways
- The third step in the CAP analysis process is determining your purpose. This involves understanding why you are writing and what you hope to achieve with your message.
- Your purpose in writing can be broken down into three aspects: general purpose, specific purpose, and underlying or additional purposes. Considering these three aspects together can help you write messages that are more effective and positively impactful.
- The general purpose of a message is its overall objective, such as to inform, persuade, motivate, or entertain.
- The specific purpose is the particular intention or goal of the message, such as to provide information about a product.
- Underlying or additional purposes are the hidden or implicit motivations behind the message, such as to build or maintain a positive relationship with the audience and to make a positive impression.
Exercises
1. Select an email or ad you’ve recently received from a company, or that you’ve come across online. What was the general purpose (eg. to inform, persuade, motivate)? What was the specific purpose of the message?
2. Read the tasks below and write one sentence to state your specific purpose. What do you hope to achieve with the writing task? What is your ultimate goal? (Hint: You will need to create your own information.)
- An email to a colleague checking about the schedule for next week. (Specific Purpose: e.g., I want to find out which days my colleague will be in the office next week.)
- An email to your instructor about the team project you’ve been working on.
- A letter to a customer explaining the refund policy for your store.
- A phone call to the warehouse, following up on an overdue shipment.
- An email to the bank about last month’s payment.
3. Imagine that you work for Pizza Hut, and you receive an angry email from a customer complaining that your restaurant served food that gave them food poisoning the next day. You need to respond to the customer. What is your general, specific, and underlying purpose of your message? (Hint: Depending on the situation, you may respond with the purpose of keeping the customer’s business and promising a refund, or you may respond by sympathizing but not offering any compensation, or you may not respond at all.)
