Consulting Journal: Writing - Who is your reader?

Writing: Who is your reader?

by David Blakey

Knowing who your readers are can help you to write better reports.

[Monday 7 October 2002]

For a change, here's something that may amuse you.

O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
State the alternative preferred.
Give reasons for your choice.

Did that amuse you, or at least make you smile?

If it did, then you have the following characteristics.

First, you have read ‘To the Cuckoo’ by William Wordsworth. If do not remember reading it, then perhaps you have heard it. Certainly, you would probably identify the first two lines as being from a real poem.

Second, you recognized the third and fourth lines as being typical of a written examination.

Third, given your previous knowledge of the poem and the form of the exam question, you were amused by the abrupt change from the first to the second.

It may be that you did not recognise the poem and that you have never encountered this form of examination question. If so, you probably were not amused by the four lines. They may have been totally incomprehensible to you. If that is so, then thank you. You have proved the point of this article.

It is easy for us to write reports for people like us. If you were a knowledgeable and experienced supply chain management consultant, you could pick up a report written by any other knowledgeable, experienced SCM consultant and understand it. You might therefore assume that anyone who was described as a supply chain management specialist within a client would also be able to understand it. But you might be making an assumption like the one that I made when I thought that you would find the poem amusing. The world is not full of people like us.

I am certainly not saying that the only people who really understand SCM - or any other speciality - are consultants. There are many excellent experts employed by clients.

My point is that you should not assume that the people who will read your report have particular knowledge - such as a poem - nor particular experience - such as sitting exams. Here is what you can do.

Analyzing your readers

Find out who will read your report

Some people may read your reports several weeks or months from now. Do not worry about them. Any consultant's report should become dated rapidly, as its purpose should be to initiate change and improvement. A few months from now, your report will no longer reflect the actual situation any more.

Some people may read the report now, even though it is not intended for them. Unless they are major stakeholders, do not consider them. If they are major stakeholders and can therefore exercise considerable influence over the acceptance or rejection of your report, then they should be on the distribution list anyway. In addition, you should have been meeting with them regularly while you were researching and writing the report.

The people to concentrate on are the people on the initial distribution list for the report.

Find out their degree of influence

It may be that some people will get a copy of your report for ‘political’ reasons. In some organizations, there are people who insist of receiving a copy of every consultant's report, even though they may never read them. It may be part of their game for getting or keeping power. See if you can find out if this occurs in your client. You can then probably ignore them from now on.

Beware, however, of ignoring the finance department. They may look at every consultant's report for a number of reasons. Principally, the finance department may be the sponsor of any project that results from your report. They will want to avoid duplicated effort - and duplicated expense. They will want to combine projects to achieve a number of goals.

Find out their knowledge and experience

At one extreme, all the influential people on the distribution list may have no knowledge or experience of the subject of your report. At the other extreme, they may all be experts. Either of these is good, because it means that you can write your entire report for that level of knowledge and experience.

Mainly, however, you will find a range of knowledge and experience. You will have to write your report so that it neither ‘talks down’ to the experts nor ‘goes over the heads’ of the others.

Writing your report

If your report is intended for a mixed audience of experts and non-experts, here are some tips.

Explicit statement

You can put an explicit statement of your intentions in the introduction to the report.

This report is intended for a technical audience. I have, however, added explanations of technical terms to make the report more readable for a non-technical audience.

This statement may boost the self-esteem of those who think that they are experts while not deprecating the inexpertise of any readers who know that they are not experts.

Glossary

You might consider including a glossary of terms. This should be at the front of the report, as the intention is to explain the terms before they are used.

A glossary works well if nouns and verbs need to be explained. It does not work well for complex phrases. It does not work at all for techniques and methods.

Additional sections

If you need to describe a technique or method, you should consider inserting a separate section in the report. It should not be an appendix. It should be a new section, inserted in the report ahead of the section that refers to the method or technique. Your inexpert readers should not get the impression that your explanation is something that has been added to the report; your expert readers should be able to flick through it to reach the following section. All readers should have the opportunity to read the explanation before they read how you applied the method or technique.

The headings for the sections should not ‘talk down’ to your readers. The explanatory section could be headed ‘The Blakey Theory of Thin Strata’ and the following section ‘The incidence of thin management strata at XYZ Limited’.

Consistency

If you recall the poem that we started with, you will remember that the humour depends on the sudden transition from the style and pace and idiom of a Romantic poem to those of a test question. You should avoid this effect between the various sections of your report. The explanatory sections should have the same style, pace and idiom as the rest of the report.

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