General Planning Approach . . .
This page presents a general planning approach for you to use as you create communication documents, from memos/letters to reports to brochures to websites to any communication you might develop. Information on this page is based on Carolyn Rude's comprehensive editing approach (previously called substantive editing) as presented in Technical Editing.
You will find brief information about audience and purpose, content, organization, style, visuals, and layout and design. This general planning approach is demonstrated in the discussion of biographies of instructors which you can reach by clicking here.
Audience & purpose . . .
Who is your primary audience? Think about the characteristics of those persons: education, reason for reading what you are writing, environment in which audience will use what you are writing, and so on. Also think about your secondary audience. Who else might read what you have written besides your primary audience? Particularly for memos and letters, you should be sure to think about what if the person(s) you most don't want to read what you have written, do read it.
What is the purpose of what you are writing? Are you trying to convince someone to buy your product? Are you providing instructions about using the product? Are you developing a sales brochure? Are you creating an informational website or one providing information about employees' benefits?
Content
What type of content most interests your audience? What content does your audience most need? If your audience consists of managers who must decide about financial matters, they will want content about those financial matters and what else is being impacted by those finances. If your report is being written to environmental scientists, they will want to know financial details, but they certainly want details about how the environment is being affected.
Organization
Is there a set organizational pattern for the document that you are preparing? Progress reports, for instance, contain certain sections as do proposals. Scientists expect a research article to follow the IMRAD organizational pattern: introductions, methods, results, and discussion plus conclusions.
If the document doesn't normally include certain sections containing standard information, after you have decided what content the audience needs, you must decide how to best organize that content.
Note: For a general approach planning document, you may discover that you can best discuss content and organization by combining the discussion of each and placing in section with the heading "Content and Organization."
Style
What words and/or terminology specific to the content of what you are preparing are suitable? The words that you choose will depend, among other considerations, upon the education of your audience and the subject matter of your content. How long should your sentence be? How complex or complicated? What tone is appropriate? Should your tone be formal or informal? Should it be light-hearted?
Provide specifics to demonstrate your general statements. For example, provide specific words and sentences. Provide a passage that demonstrates what you mean by an informal tone or a light tone.
Visuals & visual design elements
What visuals will best supplement your content? tables, photographs, schematics, bar or line graphs, flowcharts, maps, ??
What visual design elements will contribute to the document's effectiveness? bullets or cats in different positions for listings, boxes enclosing text, horizontal bars at the top and bottom of the pages, vertical and/or horizontal rules (lines), color for some of the design elements, ??
Layout & design
How will you place the text and visuals on the page? Will you use one or two or more columns? Will you lay out the text in portrait or landscape orientation?