Purpose, audience, channel

Three decisions before the first sentence

Stage 5 — communicate — begins not with a draft but with three decisions, and a document written before they are made will be rewritten after. Purpose: what the document is for. Smith's list of purposes includes informing, persuading, motivating and entertaining; for workplace documents this course keeps three — inform (the reader needs to know something), persuade (the reader must accept a recommendation), request (the reader must do something for you) — because each fixes what goes in sentence one. Audience: who reads it, and what each reader must do after reading. Channel: the medium the situation needs.

Audience is more than one person

The primary audience is the person the document is addressed to. The secondary audience is everyone it is forwarded to, copied to, or filed for — and the reader most often forgotten. For each reader, five questions: their position relative to you (client, superior, peer, subordinate); their knowledge of the topic (which fixes how much you explain and whether "weighted total" needs a gloss); their likely reaction (which fixes direct or indirect order, next lesson); the size of the audience (one reader or a department); and what each must do after reading — approve, sign, forward, reply, change a habit. A document that does not know what its reader must do cannot end properly.

Channel by richness, record and readers

Three questions choose the channel. Does the situation need richness — tone of voice, the chance to ask and answer, to see a reaction? Bad news to a person, a negotiation, a disagreement: a meeting or a call, followed by something written. Does it need a record — something that can be filed, forwarded and relied on later? Then it is written: a memo (internal, on the record, often several readers), an email (the default written channel, external or one-to-one, faster), a letter (external, formal, when the document itself matters — an engagement letter, a refusal), a report (a long analysis with sections and appendices). How many readers? One reader with a question gets an email; a whole office being told a policy gets a memo.

Worked example — Lakeshore's stage 5

Purpose: persuade — Priya must accept a recommendation and act on it. Primary audience: Priya Raman, owner; the client, above you; knows her business intimately and the press's history, does not know decision matrices — so the matrix is explained in one sentence and the totals are given meaning, not just values; likely reaction neutral to positive (she asked for an answer and this one costs her nothing up front); she must approve the lease route by 22 November. Secondary audience: her bank manager — she will forward the memo when the lease commitment is discussed; a financial reader who will look for the annual cost, the term and the exit clause; and Wren's own file. Channel: a memo — an internal-style record with the analysis attached, on file at Wren and at Lakeshore, readable by a forwarded reader without the conversation that produced it. Not an email: the analysis is too long for a screen and the document will be relied on later. Not a report: one decision, two pages.

Three neighbours, for contrast. Asking three vendors for lease quotes — request, external, one-to-one each: an email. A $2 million decision on whether to open a second plant — inform and persuade, many readers, months of analysis: a report. Telling the two operators their jobs go, had outsourcing won — bad news to people, richness essential: a meeting, then a letter each for the record.

Decide for the clinic

Tomas asked for "a short email by next Friday". Purpose: persuade. Primary: Tomas, office manager, who will implement it; knows the front desk, not the software; must obtain the quotes. Secondary: the two dentists — Tomas will forward it, and they approve the spend; so the cost and the no-show revenue must survive forwarding without Tomas's commentary. Channel: the email he asked for, with the matrix as an attachment — one topic, the recommendation in sentence one, the approval he needs from the dentists named as the action.

State the rules cold

Purpose fixes sentence one. Audience is everyone who reads it, with what each must do. Channel: richness → meet; record → write; internal, on the record, several readers → memo; external or one-to-one → email; long analysis → report.