Understand your audience

1. Identify your primary and secondary audience

Consider the situation below to determine the primary and secondary audiences.

For every message you write, always consider both your primary audience and any potential secondary audiences. As the writer, you have little-to-no control over who sees your message. An email can be forwarded, and a text or voicemail message can be shown or played to anyone. This is especially important to keep in mind in professional and academic settings, as staff and student email accounts are considered company or college property and can be reviewed by the administration at any time. Therefore, before sending that email or text, always consider how it could be received by anyone who might eventually read it.

2. Identify your relationship(s) with your audience

Considering your relationship to your audience is crucial when writing a professional message because it sets the tone and will help you determine how formal you should be in your communication. For instance, if you are writing to your boss, you may need to be more formal and use a more structured and concise format than if you were writing to a colleague. On the other hand, if you are writing to a client or customer, you may want to adopt a more friendly tone to begin building a positive working relationship with them.

For example, suppose you’re writing an email to a potential new employee to schedule a job interview. You may start your email with a more formal greeting, such as “Dear Ms. Garcia,” if it’s your first interaction. However, after the interview with Ms. Garcia, you may feel you have established a friendly relationship with her, so you can start with a more casual greeting, such as “Hello Lidia,” to reflect your rapport (friendly connection). By doing this, you show your consideration for the relationship you have with your audience and create a positive tone.

For more information on how to address your audience, see the chart at the bottom of this page.

3. Predict your audience’s reaction

If your message is simple and routine, you may not need to spend a lot of time on this step. However, if your message is complex, the message is unexpected, and/or you predict that your audience may be uncaring or hostile towards your message, you’ll need to carefully profile your audience and adjust your message to improve the chances that your audience will respond positively (or respond at all).

As we saw in ‘Anmol’s Story’, a lot can go wrong when we don’t stop to predict our audience’s reaction to a message. For example, imagine that you are a new employee at a gaming company and you email your boss your ideas about an upcoming project. You don’t pause to think about how your boss might react, so you write out your ideas in a long, rambling email that includes personal information and uses informal language that you would normally use when texting with friends. You assume that your boss will find this style fun and engaging; you don’t stop to think about how your boss is always very busy and that his emails to staff are always short, professional, and to the point. It really shouldn’t be a surprise, therefore, that he wouldn’t respond very positively to an informal, unexpected email, and that he would more likely be annoyed rather than impressed or amused in receiving it.

It’s worth noting that in some Canadian workplaces, using an overly formal or impersonal communication style can cause negative reactions, too. For instance, in friendly, informal workplace cultures – the kind were coworkers bond by sharing pictures of their kids, dogs, and favourite memes – it can be just as off-putting when new employees remain formal and impersonal with their coworkers instead of imitating the friendly tone of their workplace. In these settings, overly formal employees may come across as unfriendly, and may give their superiors and coworkers the impression that they don’t want to become a full or long-term member of the ‘team.’

As both scenarios demonstrate, failing to predict your audience’s reaction to your messages can lead to misunderstandings, hold back or even damage your professional and academic relationships, and make it less likely that your audience will respond to your messages in a positive or helpful way.

Properly predicting your audience’s reaction and adjusting your message accordingly, on the other hand, will have a huge impact on how well it’s received.

4. Determine your audience’s needs and interests

As discussed in the previous example, how you frame your message will have a big impact on your audience’s reaction. The more considerate you are of your audience’s time, energy, preferences, and needs, the more likely it is that your audience will respond positively.

As we will discuss further in Chapter 2, determining your audience’s needs, framing your message from the audience’s point of view, and highlighting how your message will benefit your reader are excellent strategies that can make your communication stronger and more audience-focused.

In the meantime, read on for more on one crucial and particular audience need: the need for an appropriate level of information and explanation.

5. Consider your audience’s level of understanding

Another key step whenever sharing information is to determine how much your audience knows about the topic you’re writing about so you can provide the right amount of necessary information. In the Canadian workplace, it’s always safe to assume that people are busy and don’t have time to read any more than is necessary. If you over explain a topic in an email, you make the double mistake of wasting the reader’s time and insulting them by implying that they are not knowledgeable about the topic.

Imagine that you’re a first-year college student and you’re working on a group project with your classmates. You’ve been assigned to write a report on different communication styles, and one of your group members is responsible for conducting the research. Before you start writing an email to this group member about the project, it’s important to consider their level of understanding of the report’s subject matter. If they are already familiar with the topic, you can assume that they have a basic understanding of the concepts and technical terms related to the report. In this case, you can use technical language and specific terminology without worrying that your group member will have trouble understanding your message.

On the other hand, writing too little because you’ve incorrectly assumed that your audience knows what you know also inconveniences them.  For instance, if your group member is not as familiar with the subject matter, you should avoid using technical language and unknown terms, and instead, provide explanations and context to ensure that they can understand your message without the need for clarifications and follow-up emails. For example, you might define any key terms or concepts related to communication styles and provide examples to illustrate their meaning. By tailoring (adjusting) your email to your group member’s level of understanding, you can ensure that they can complete their part of the project effectively, and that the final report is a success.

6. Consider your audience’s background, characteristics, and preferred form of address

As we learned in ‘Reflect on your context (part I)’, a person’s cultural background, personal communication style, and other characteristics hugely impact the way that they read and interpret messages. Just as you should reflect on your own cultural and personal context before writing, you should also reflect on your audience’s cultural and personal qualities to help you determine how to most effectively communicate your message and ensure that they will receive it as you intended. You can use the five dimensions of culture (high vs. low context, time orientation, formality, communication style, individualism) and four personal communication styles as starting points to begin determining how to tailor your approach to your audience.

If you are writing to an international or multicultural audience, which is common in a college setting and in a multicultural city like Vancouver, also be aware that there is no universal form of English, but rather many forms of English (or ‘Englishes’) that are unique to specific English-speaking cultures. Therefore, it’s best to either avoid or explain terms, references, and expressions (such as the Canadian hockey term “score a hat-trick” or the American baseball term “hit a home run”) that are not likely to be understood by those who are unfamiliar with that particular culture.

This is one of the many reasons why it’s usually best to write professional messages in a clear, professional-but-conversational style, using mid-level language that can be easily understood by anyone, regardless of their cultural background or education level (as this textbook attempts to do).  This will be discussed in-depth in Chapter 3.

Finally, it’s essential to determine how your reader would prefer to be addressed, for example when writing your greeting at the beginning of an email (ex. Hello Sandra!). To help you with this, we’ve included a salutation chart below for your reference.

When in doubt, the best way to show respect when addressing someone in a Canadian context is to address them in the way that they would like to or have asked to be addressed (even if this doesn’t match your personal customs or preferences). This is in keeping with the fact that Canada and North America are highly individualistic societies, so we can generally assume that each person has the right and expectation of being addressed according to their preference.