Lesson 2: The Importance of Audience
Applying your audience analysis to your writing
You should keep your view of the intended audience in mind at all times throughout your design and writing stages. As you're writing, think about what someone with that skill set and experience would already know about the topics you're writing about. Consider whether they'll be familiar with standard terminology or if you need to define every technical term you use. Organize your book in a way that will make sense to that audience. If you expect a particular book to be used as a reference, make sure each small piece of information is indexed and otherwise easy to find. If you're writing a conceptual overview of a topic, make sure either your intended audience should already know the topics leading up to that one or that you've documented those other topics before this one.
Going back to our previous example of teaching Visual Basic developers how to build front end applications to our product, we know we can insert Visual Basic code into our documentation without much explanation, that we can assume the reader understands the concepts of data types, that the reader knows what forms are and how to move from one form to another, that they know how to create buttons, labels, and other controls, and that they understand how error handling works in Visual Basic. However, if our product makes various error messages available, I cannot assume the user knows these codes but I can assume they know how to implement them once I provide a list of codes and when they should be used.
