If you think about the audiences you have written for in school, you’ll notice they have the following characteristics. They usually consist of one reader (the teacher) whom you know personally. This reader usually knows more about the subject than you do. You can expect this reader to read your entire paper. (In fact, you would have a legitimate complaint if the reader didn't!) Since the purpose of school writing is to "show what you know," the teacher often puts a great deal of emphasis on the details that show in-depth knowledge. Thus, the teacher reads carefully, trying hard to figure out what you have to say (usually the teacher is trying to decide how much you've learned in order to give you a fair grade). If something isn't clear, the teacher can often supply missing information or see where an unclear argument is going.

In contrast to this ideal situation, the audiences you will normally have to deal with in a real-world setting are much more difficult. First of all, these are likely to consist of a variety of readers; instead of a single audience for a single communication, you may well have multiple audiences for that one communication. These readers will probably know less about the subject than you do, which means you'll have to explain things to them. They may differ in background knowledge, in need and purposes, and in reading conditions. Thus, they may differ in their reading strategies, some reading only one part of the document, others skipping from section to section, still others studying every word. If something isn't clear to them, they may make no effort to figure it out.

In a real-world setting, it's no longer easy to "psych out the professor" that is, to put into a paper just what you know a single reader wants. Nonetheless, it's just as important to try to understand and satisfy all of your various readers' needs. In the next few pages, we discuss several of the largest and most important types of audiences you are likely to encounter: managerial audiences, nonspecialist audiences, peer audiences, international audiences, and mixed audiences. This is not an exhaustive list, but it serves to point out some major variables you should be aware of.

Managerial Audiences
Managers are often the most important audiences for technical communicators because they make decisions that affect projects and careers. If scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals hope to influence these decision makers favorably, they had better understand how managers work and what will catch their attention.

The nature of managerial work has been studied by a number of researchers, and one of them, Henry Mintzberg, has made some particularly telling observations. Mintzberg notes that managers fill many roles at one time. These roles largely determine how a manager communicates. According to Mintzberg, the fundamental managerial roles are interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader of the unit, liaison to external units. However, since managers have many contacts from their interpersonal roles and their power, they also have important informational roles: they are the "nerve centers of information." As such they monitor and disseminate information and serve as the spokesperson for their units. Finally, managers have decisional roles: then, are initiators of change—supervising up to 50 new projects at a time—disturbance handlers, resource allocators, and negotiators. In short, as Leonard R. Sayles has put it, a manager is like a symphony orchestra conductor, endeavoring to maintain a melodious performance in which the contributions of the various instruments are coordinated and sequenced, patterned and paced, while the orchestra members are having various personal difficulties, stagehands are moving music stands, alternating excessive heat and cold are creating audience and instrument problems, and the sponsor of the concert is insisting on irrational changes in the program.

The effects of this environment on communication are severe; managers obviously have little time or attention to spare for careful reading or listening. For instance, according to Mintzberg:

Half the activities engaged in by the five chief executives of his study lasted less than nine minutes, and only 10% exceeded one hour.
These five chief executives treated mail processing as a burden to be dispensed with. One came in Saturday morning to process 142 pieces of mail in just over three hours, to "get rid of all the stuff." This same manager looked at the first piece of "hard" mail he had received all week, a standard cost report, and put it aside with the comment, "I never look at this."

Rather than being reflective, systematic planners, as is commonly believed, managers actually "work at an unrelenting pace, . . . are strongly oriented to action and dislike reflective activities."

Given this almost impossible set of handicaps, what can you do to make a memo or report more easily read and more fully understood by managers? One thing is to make key information maximally accessible by foregrounding it—that is, by putting it up front where the manager can easily, find it. A study of Westinghouse executives by Professor James Souther found that all read the Abstract or Executive Summary and most read the Introduction, Background, and Conclusions sections. By contrast, only 15% read the body of a report. In general, these managerial readers looked for important generalizations and tended to ignore details.'

Nonspecialist Audiences
Nonspecialist audiences are often the most difficult audiences to write for. These are the readers who know little about a subject but will be reading your writing in detail to find out more. (Managers are also nonspecialists, but they typically ignore most details.) If you are writing a proposal to a potential client, you are probably writing for a nonspecialist audience. If you are responding to a letter of complaint from an angry customer, you are probably writing for a nonspecialist audience. If you are writing a set of operating instructions, you are probably writing for a nonspecialist audience. There are many other situations like these. You yourself become a member of the nonspecialist audience whenever you read something out of your field.

The difficulty of writing for nonspecialist readers is this: As a specialist, you become used to thinking about certain topics in certain specialized ways. Your knowledge of these topics is so great that you've organized it in your mind into a network of manageable chunks, each consisting of many smaller chunks. And you've given special labels, or "technical terms," to many of these chunks. By simply using these terms, you've found it easier to think about these topics. In fact, it may be somewhat difficult for you to think about such topics without using your technical terms. The problem, of course, is that nonspecialists do not know those terms and do not have all of those chunks of knowledge organized into a nice, coherent network. If you insist on using only your technical language, you fail to create a bridge of common knowledge between you and your nonspecialist reader. And this makes communication difficult, perhaps even impossible.

There are a number of things you can do to make life easier for the nonspecialist reader. They boil down to one basic principle: Refer to "common knowledge" as much as you can without distorting the technical content of your message. You begin doing this at the very outset by using a conventional mode of presentation. Standard genres like the proposal, the short report, and the operating manual are familiar to most people with whom you’re likely to be communicating. By sticking to the conventions of a well-known genre, you enable the reader to have a better sense of the overall flow of your logic. Providing an overview at the beginning of your document also helps.

Another way of making the nonspecialist reader feel more at home is to provide some background information. You do not necessarily have to put it all up front (where it might get in the way of more knowledgeable readers). Rather, you can work it into the document here and there, much as journalists do in their news reports. But it should he true background information in the sense that it is explanatory and free of jargon.

In general, writing for nonspecialists means using lots of explanations. For relatively, simple concepts, this can usually be done by using embedded definitions . Earlier in this chapter, for example, when we used the technical linguistic term foregrounding, we made a point of immediately defining it for you. You can do the same with many of your own technical terms. The least intrusive way of defining a term is by using a short paraphrase enclosed in parentheses: "A common health problem in many countries is hypertension (high blood pressure)."

For more complex concepts that are crucial for understanding the text as a whole, you may want to use examples. By taking something abstract and making it more concrete, examples are extremely powerful aids to understanding. However, they should be chosen carefully. They should highlight important features in a very direct and obvious way. Nonessential features should be avoided. And everything about the example should already be familiar to the reader.

Illustrations (photographs, drawings, graphs, etc.) are also helpful in making things clear to a nonspecialist reader. Like examples, illustrations are usually powerful and vivid. They attract attention, and they are memorable. But as with examples, then, must be carefully chosen or the their power will work against you. Make sure that your illustrations are not so specialized that a nonspecialist audience will not know how to interpret them. And make sure they focus on the concept you’re trying to illustrate, not something else.

Finally, for special occasions, you may want to try analogies (or "verbal illustrations"). These often require quite a lot of imagination, and they can be misleading if then, are not designed carefully. Therefore, you should use analogies only as a last resort, when none of the techniques mentioned above will work.

Peer Audiences
Sometimes you have the luxury of writing for peers, people who know as much about the subject as you do. For example, if you're a condensed-matter physicist and are writing an article on condensed matter for Physical Review, you’re probably writing primarily for other condensed-matter specialists. If you're part of a design team that's been working on a project for several months, you probably write memos and notes to other team members who are as familiar with the project as you are.

In cases like these, you effectively "speak the same language" as the people you are writing to. Therefore, you don't need to do many of the things you would do for a nonspecialist audience, such as giving lengthy explanations, defining terms, and using many examples. In fact, if you used such devices with your peers, they might accuse you of being patronizing. With peers, you should use language the way most other people in your field use it. You should

Use standard technical terms.
Use a conventional format.
Emphasize data and display it in standard ways, using graphs, tables, equations, or other appropriate forms.
Use standard forms of reasoning and argumentation.
Make your main points clear and accessible.
Be careful not to overstate your claims.

Given the basic facts of a situation, experts can usually fill in whatever gaps there might be. They can make inferences. This means that you do not need to spell things out for them. And this allows you to be concise in your writing. Experts are somewhat like managers in that they like to scan a piece of writing for its main points. A concise, well-structured piece of writing makes this easier for them. But experts differ from managers in that they often want to examine certain minute pieces of data. As an expert yourself, you should anticipate this and decide what data you think your peers will want to look at. Then you should present it in a clear, accessible form.

International Audiences
The world is getting smaller. National economies are becoming more and more interdependent. International scientific conferences have become commonplace, multinational corporations abound, and foreign trade is at an all-time high. Technical professionals have been caught up in all this activity as much as anybody. More and more scientists, engineers, administrators, and businesspeople are traveling abroad, interacting with foreign colleagues, and negotiating with foreign companies and clients.

Increasingly, the language being used for these kinds of activities is English. Indeed, English has become the international language of science, technology, and commerce. If you happen to overhear a conversation between a Singaporean businesswoman and a Brazilian businesswoman, it's likely to be in English. If you glance at a list of biomedical articles in the Index Medicus, you'll probably find that most of them are written in English. Today, there are more nonnative speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers.

We are fortunate to have a language like English for international communication. But this does not mean that all language problems are eliminated. Most nonnative speakers of English do not have full command of the language. You should keep this in mind and try to use a "controlled" form of English. Specifically, you should:

Avoid long or complicated sentences. Other languages often have different ways of forming sentences, and forcing nonnative speakers to figure out English syntax will only make things difficult for them. This is especially important to remember when writing step-by-step instructions.
Avoid idiomatic vocabulary. Although many nonnative speakers have large vocabularies, many others do not. They may depend on a few thousand basic words, the kind that are found in small pocket dictionaries. They may easily be confused by idiomatic language, slang, or multiword phrases. Instead of saving, "I'm feeling a little under the weather," say, "I'm feeling a little sick." Avoid sports-oriented and other culture-specific slang like out in left field and do an end-run. Be aware that English combines common verbs (make, turn, put, etc.) and particles (up, out, over, etc.) to create very different meanings; just think of the differences between turn down, turn into, turn up, turn over, and turn out—each of which has at least two different meanings of its own. Use such expressions only if you cannot think of a simple one-word equivalent.
If you are using examples or analogies, try not to make them too culture specific. Look for opportunities to use visual aids instead of verbal explanations.

Mixed Audiences
Probably the most difficult audience for a writer to deal with is an audience consisting of managers, nonspecialists, experts, and normative speakers, or some smaller combination of these. Unfortunately, such mixed audiences are commonplace. For example, proposals to do funded research are read by both generalists and technical specialists. The generalists usually make the final decision, but their judgment is deeply influenced by that of the specialists. If you are writing such a proposal, you'd better make sure it's comprehensible and persuasive to both groups. Or consider the many situations where you write a letter or memo to a single person but list other people to receive copies. Those people on the copy list constitute an audience whose knowledge and interests may differ significantly from those of the primary addressee. In some cases, the copied audience may actually be more important than the addressee.

International communication of course, is likely to involve both native speakers and nonnative speakers, as well as managers and experts. We could easily give many other examples. How can you best meet the needs of such mixed audiences? There are basically two ways:

"Layer" the document so that different sections are aimed at different audiences.
"Democratize" your writing so that all audiences can understand all parts of it.

A common example of the layered approach is the intermediate-length or long technical report: the first page contains background information and recommendations for the managerial reader, while the body of the report and the appendixes contain details that are usually of more interest to the specialist. Long proposals are usually layered, as are many user manuals. The layered strategy works well in many circumstances, and is generally easy to follow: you can "switch hats" from one section to another or use a mixed team of writers.

There are many situations, though, where a mixed audience will want to read an entire document rather than just selected parts of it. This is where the "democratic" strategy works better. You aim each part of the document at its most important audience, but you add little touches that make the parts accessible to other audiences as well. For example, let's say you've written an in-house proposal to modify the electronic mail system in your company. You figure that the proposal will be distributed to upper management, to department heads, to computer systems technicians, and, indirectly, to other users of the system (engineers, clerical staff, etc.). You expect that upper management will be interested primarily in the main points of the proposal, so you gear the Executive Summary to that audience. You expect that department heads and other users will want a detailed account of how your modification will work, and so you tailor the Narrative of the proposal to them. You assume that the technicians will be most interested in the technical details, so you provide a section for them discussing implementation procedures, security problems, systems reliability, etc.