Chapter 3 reading

Chapter 3 focuses on defining your objectives before starting your writing. Techniques for defining your objectives are divided into ten guidelines. Each of the ten guidelines gives valuable information about writing in a professional capacity. I understand the importance of knowing your readers and writing an effective communiqué but the amount of information needed to meet the readers’ needs seemed overwhelming. Guideline 4: Learn Your Readers’ Personal Characteristics and Guideline 5: Global Guideline: Learn Your Readers’ Cultural Characteristics seemed especially cumbersome. Perhaps to an experienced writer this task becomes second nature, but to a new employee this seems daunting. Guideline 7: Ask Others to Help You Understand Your Readers and Their Context did address some of my concerns. I agree that it would be very valuable to be able to interview your readers. The worksheet for defining objectives (Fig.3.5) is also a very useful tool. This worksheet uses questions to help the writer define the objective of the written work and seems to make the task of addressing each reader easier.
Guideline 8: Learn Who All Your Readers Will Be is a difficult task. I know that most memos will have phantom readers, but how do you write to these readers when you do not know who they will be? How do you write to future readers?
Guideline 10: Ethics Guideline: Identify Your Communication’s Stakeholders is an important guideline. This guideline deals with ethics. I agree that an ethical perspective should be used in every stage of a writer’s communication.
The examples of defining objectives given in this chapter were helpful in helping me understand how to write for very readers, but I now realize how much practice is needed in order to write an effective communication.