Chapter 3 Reading

Chapter three was all about developing a mental picture of who is going to read your written document. This is somewhat of a tricky idea for me to understand. First of all, how do you ever know for sure who is going to read it and what they will think of it? However, the textbook did provide a lot of guidelines to help you discover that fact.

1. Focus on what you want to happen while your readers are reading
2. Define your usability goal: analyze your readers’ reading tasks
3. Define your persuasive goal: analyze your readers’ attitudes
4. Learn your readers’ personal characteristics
5. Global guideline: learn your readers’ cultural characteristics
6. Study the context in which your readers will read
7. Ask others to help you understand your readers and their context
8. Learn who ALL your readers will be
9. Identify any constraints on the way you write
10. Ethics guideline: identify your communication’s stakeholders

I thought the guideline on cultural characteristics was especially interesting. Growing up in the United States we learn how to write, how people react to things, and certain ways to conduct ourselves. Once you have conquered the hurdle of understanding the English language, spending years of time in classes studying it, you believe you can write anything to anyone. But with the globalization of the world economy, those skills you learned may not even be applicable when it comes to writing globally. Writing directly and to the point may be preferred in the United States, but if you wrote directly to someone in the Korean culture, you would be considered rude. So, that rule is out the window. How about writing with a lot of detail so that your reader will be sure to interpret exactly what you are trying to get across? Well, if you try that when writing to someone in Japan, you would be implying that they don’t know the things they should know. Your efforts to help the reader in understanding what they need to know would be implying that the reader is stupid. Cultural differences are huge. While there are many cultural differences to deal with, making any effort to be sensitive to the readers’ culture will be better than being arrogant and ignoring the differences altogether.

The other guideline that struck me was the one on learning who all your readers will be. Just because you are writing a memo to your immediate supervisor doesn’t mean that he won’t show it to his supervisor, or anyone else in the organization. This happens all the time. When writing something, you have to take into account all phantom and future readers. Your written word will not only be passed around, it will also be filed and documented so that future readers may pick it up. It could also be used as evidence in lawsuits.

After reading through this chapter about all the ways that not knowing your audience can affect you, I have definitely realized the importance of spending a little time studying your audience before writing anything.