You write a different document based on how you define your audience. Because your understanding of your audience controls so many of your writing decisions, analyze the audience before you write. The key ideas are

• Who are they?
• How much do they know?
• What do they expect?

Find out who your audience is. Is it one person or a group or several groups? Are you writing a memo to a specific individual or instructions for "typical" workers?

Estimate how much they know. If they are advanced, they know what terms mean, and they understand the implications of sentences. If you are addressing beginners, you have to explain more.

Determine expectations. Expectations are the factors that could make an audience see the document differently than you intend. Will the document be interesting? Will it help them to perform a task? Will it conform to their sense of what this kind of document should look and sound like?

Keeping a clear image of your audience as you write will help you decide how to handle the inevitable presentation and content problems.