Audience and goal

Written texts have two major invisible properties: audience and goal. I can't remember who taught me about that, but I taught it to my friend Abhijit Menon-Sen when we started working together, and the texts he and I have written together over the years always have a hidden comment describing the audience(s) and goal(s) for that text. That's why those texts are crisp and to the point.

Here's an example. Not by us together, this one is his alone.

Abhijit and his girlfriend Hassath have recently built a house, it's aaaaalmost done now, and a few weeks ago Abhijit wrote a blog posting about an electric power gadget they bought for the house. The audience for that posting consists of two groups of people: Friends who want to know how the house is coming along, and people who are searching for reviews of the gadget before possibly buying one themselves. The goal for the first group is to describe the power problems and how Abhijit and Hassath are coping, and for the second group, to tell them whether and how well that particular gadget helps with that kind of power problem.

Now please read about their amazingly unreliable power supply and consider how each sentence, each paragraph and each picture helps with either or both of those goals, in the eyes of those audiences. Does a sentence say something that both audiences already know, or does it tell either or both audiences something Abhijit wants to tell them? Does a sentence help with one goal but disturb the other? What does the photo achieve? Would mentioning the audiences or goals in the text help to achieve either of the goals, or would it distract or detract?

That posting may be stylistically vapid, but it achieves Abhijit's goals and that makes it good writing. The rest is a mere question of how good.

Now please start formulating an explicit audience and goal before you write your own email, documentation, almost anything. Help save the world from pointless blather and documentation that forgets the critical points.