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Objective versus subjective writing

Completely objective

Dont use the first person

Write from a general persons perspective

Superficially objective

Presentation order

Subjective writing

Think about your audience

Two types of audience

Audience knowledge

Laypeople

Getting the message across to laypeople

Analogies

Managers

Experts

Hostile or friendly

Unknown audiences

What does the audience want

Managers

There are a few names for this audience; some people like to call it the ‘well informed’ or ‘some knowledge of the area’ audience. I like calling it the ‘manager’ audience. Often in a company, managers are people who were technical experts for a while before moving into management positions. So even though they’re now managers, they will remember some of the expert knowledge they used to use. However, their memory may be a little bit patchy, or procedures and techniques may have changed, so their knowledge isn’t completely reliable.

This type of audience usually has some idea about the topic, but aren’t up-to-date experts. This means that you can generally write at a higher level than you would for a layperson. You don’t have to explain as many things or go into as much detail in your explanations.

Because managers are more likely to know about a subject than laypeople, you can put less explanation into the actual body of the document, and instead refer people to appendices where you’ve put extra information. This saves the managers who do know the topic from having to skip through all the explanation in the document itself. But managers who need a refresher on the topic can refer to the appendices if they want.

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