Write for Your Audience, Not against Them
Explore how to identify your intended audience in technical writing and adapt your tone, style, and content to meet their knowledge and needs. Learn to tailor background information, examples, and organization to connect with experts, technicians, executives, or non-specialists effectively.
What is an audience?
In technical writing, your audience is your intended reader: it's who you're writing for. Usually, your audience can be categorized into the following groups:
Experts: These are the people who generate ideas about the project/product and may have even designed or tested it. They have a high level of technical knowledge.
Technicians: These are the people who build and maintain the project/product. They also have a high level of technical knowledge, but it may be more practical and less theoretical than expert knowledge.
Executives: These are people who fund projects/products and make decisions about them on a business or administrative level. Their technical knowledge level is usually lower than experts or technicians, and is often similar to the knowledge level of non-specialists.
Non-specialists: These are typically the end-users of a product or the people curious about a project. They have the lowest technical knowledge level. Unless you are ...