Understanding our Purpose and Audience

Welcome back all! Last week was pretty hectic for me with softball, classes, and homework, but I’m so ready to get back on track. Now, let’s get down to business.

This week we will be talking about how to analyze our audience and purpose when writing technical documents. Are we writing to our patients? Our peers? What is the message we are trying to convey?

Let’s take a closer look:

Understanding Audience and Purpose

Suppose we are designing an infographic to our patients about how to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into their diet. The infographic is going to be colorful, informative, energetic, and probably less formal. Also, we would use vocabulary that is not too scientific where our patients wouldn’t understand.  If the infographic has all of those characteristics, it makes the information appealing to the audience and easy to read and encourages them to incorporate the fruits and veggies daily. On the other hand, if we were creating a PowerPoint presentation that teaches our patients how to calculate their macronutrients, we will create a more formal, informative, and detailed description since the data that we are communicating to our patients is more quantitative compared the infographic that is more qualitative (i.e adding spinach to a smoothie and why spinach can increase weight loss).

Determining the Important Characteristics of our Audience

It is important to not only know who our audience is but their basic demographic information. What level of education do our patients’ have? If we have a 17-year-old client who is visiting us at the hospital seeking treatment for their eating disorder, we must use appropriate vocabulary that will be easy for the adolescent to understand, and not advanced medical terminology that would be difficult to apply.

We must also know our clients’ experience in the professional world. What careers have they taken part in? Let’s say we have a nurse as a patient looking for ways to live a healthier lifestyle. Having worked in the medical field and with other medical technicians, it will be easier to speak with more intellectual terminology and communicate effectively because the nurse is experienced in that manner.

As dietitians, we will come across patients of multiple different cultures. It is important to make sure that people of different cultures will be able to translate our documents. For example, if we create a meal plan for someone native to a Spanish speaking country, we must take the time to translate the document so that it is easy for our patients to comprehend and apply to their daily routine.

While we are on the topic of culture, I want to lead you into the next idea:
Communicating Across Cultures.

As mentioned above, it is vital that we as dietitians can communicate with all clients, even if they have cultural differences. As dietitians, it is our job to know the cultural variables that our clients have. This is significant because, in some cultures and religions, certain foods are banned from their specific diets. We must meet the dietary requirements for all of our cultural clients, which is why it is essentially important to know our audience and the demographics that they obtain. This would be an example of understanding cultural differences above the surface. An example of understanding cultural differences beneath the surface would be the distance between ranks. Some cultures prefer to be addressed as Miss, Mrs., or Dr., depending on their level of expertise. As dietitians, if we are writing an email to a client of this nature, we must be knowledgeable on this topic, because it will make our appearance more respectable and professional.

Overall, it is vital to understand our purpose of writing documents and the demographics of our patients. When we can do this, we will communicate clearly and effectively. Thanks for tuning in! I hope you all have a great night!

Talk soon,

#sharingwithshar