For your writing to be most effective you need to create your document plan so it addresses the following audience needs:
- Knowledge Level:
- Does your audience have prior knowledge of the subject or is it new to them? What do they want to or need to know from the document?
- Role:
- Is your audience at management level, technical level or entry level? Are they decision makers who need to know certain things and in a certain order?
- Interest:
- Does your audience want to or need to know the document contents, or will they be more interested in only certain aspects of it?
- Culture:
- Is your audience's cultural background different to yours?
- Personality:
- Should you write in a strictly formal manner or more open and friendly?
As you can see from this list, you can't just go and throw together some technical jargon, legal speak and/or financial data and expect your audience to read or understand what you have written. It has to be tailored to the main demographic that will be reading it (or be expected to read it). Also, unless your intended audience is likely to know the terms in use, do not use abbreviations and/or acronyms without providing a clear deciphering of the term(s) when you first introduce them in the document. Even then, it is usually good practice to include the full term(s) somewhere in your document, as your audience may still need a "refresher".
The trickier part comes in when you are writing for a mixed audience and you are needing to write parts of the document for one audience and the rest for another audience. In this case you'll need to create multiple document plans - one for each expected audience. And don't worry too much about them reading the "other" sections of the document, they are very likely to skip over what they don't need to read, especially if it doesn't read easy for them.
