Target Audience#
The target audience is one of the most important factors that influence how a text — any text — is written. All authoring guidelines for documentation recommend that the author tailor their instructions, explanations and definitions to their target audience. In writing, the target audience is pictured in the same way as elsewhere: a group of people that share a set of prominent features relevant to the context.
When you think of what text is, the value of the target audience as pictured becomes less influential. A text is made of concepts: their descriptions, definitions, and relations. The target audience as a group of people has no place in this simple model.
Yet, the target audience is in fact one of the most important factors for text, if it is mapped to concepts.
Explanation Declined#
Regardless of who the readers are, the author can view the target audience as a collection of concepts from the text. Specifically, the target audience comprises all concepts that need not be explained because the reader must know these concepts already in order to be able to understand what the author is telling them.
This perspective produces an interesting effect. With the target audience being a collection of known concepts, the author should focus on explaining and defining the concepts outside of this collection. Hence, the value of any text is in the size of this second collection, which literally constitutes the novelty of information for readers.
Explanation Details#
By applying a simple analysis where the concepts from the given context are assigned to either the reader’s scope (target audience) or the text scope, the author is able to detect one of the nastiest problems in authoring: overexplanation. Readers do not gain useful information when they encounter an explanation of something they already know.
The opposite is also true: by assigning concepts to either the reader’s scope or the text scope, the author can detect occurrences of underexplanation. I call this defect among friends syndrome: the author freely uses unexplained concepts assuming readers know them. This resembles a conversation where people may just mention facts, places, events, and they understand each other while a stranger would have no clue what they refer to.
Target Audience Expansion#
Place the target audience into the confines of the text as the reader’s scope to realize that this scope is not static. As soon as the reader consumes the next concept from the text scope, the concept travels to the reader’s scope. It is now known to the reader.
The author need not explain it and may use the newly explained term in the following explanations.
Target Audience Value#
Why it matters …
—Anthropic Claude
The distribution of concepts between the reader’s scope and the text scope is a boring kind of analysis that authors wouldn’t bother doing. They can trust their intuition and determine what to explain and how.
However, with the reader’s scope and the text scope, there are unexpected gains if the author chooses to interface with artificial intelligence, such as:
- Improving summaries
If placed into the bounds of the text scope, the summary only tells what the reader will learn and not the part that they already know. The answer to the question “Is this material worth reading?” becomes substantially more accurate.
- Evaluating terminology definitions
Definitions are notorious for being descriptive or alien instead of definitive. Descriptive when they don’t tell the reader what a concept is but how useful it is. Alien are those definitions that use unknown terminology in explanations. A truly useful definition is that where an unknown term (the one belonging to the text scope) is defined through known terms (those that belong to the reader’s scope).
- Specifying the prerequisites
“Is it worth my time reading this material?” is answered by the question “Do you understand the concepts from the reader’s scope for this material?”