What You Want to Say and Audience Selection
From Zanecorpwiki
This essay is written from the perspective of software development because that's what I know best. I do believe, however, that the majority of the points--especially the important ones--are generally applicable.
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Audience and Software
Effective writing, and effective communication in general, requires first and foremost an understanding of the audience. Modern software development, best typified by web development, is very much a kind of communication. The developer is simultaneously talking to two audiences: the computer and the user.
Software is a meta-conversation of sorts which enables and defines the final conversation between human and machine. This phenomenon is in no way unique to software. The best art coordinates conversations between individuals that is apart from, yet enabled through the artist, just as the user-machine conversation is apart from yet related to the artist. It is like imagining a journey to come and laying out supplies and shelter along the way.
Audiences of Software
As mentioned, there are two categories of audience: the user and the machine. Within each category, there are many types. A user may be anything from a neophyte AJAX developer with significant history in HTML and small PHP sites, but little in the way design or large systems design to a computer literate accountant who uses Excel to develop Fortune 500 financial models but can't check his email without help to a 15 year old girl who has never thought about, yet better understands the ideas of social network than the founders of Facebook ever did.
By the same token, the machine in question may be anything from single host, multi-processor LAPPref group=noteLinux-Apache-Postgres-PHP, better than LAMP./ref stack to a cluster hosted ORB-Java to a bash interpreter.ref group=noteMachine here refers to the general definition of a machine, so refers to the machine that runs the software. Some physical silicon computer--in modern times silicon computer and OS--is always (?) at the foundation of the machine, but is very rarely the thing that the developer is writing directly to. Each combination of physical chips, basic operating system, virtual hosts, virtual machines, interpreters, libraries, and frameworks creates a unique machine audience./ref
Choosing the Audience
We can look at how to best communicate from two perspectives. First, when our audience is fixed, the most important thing is to be adaptable. To put ourselves in their position, to empathize, and to speak in a way that they can understand us.
Yet, there is nothing to say that the creator can't choose their audience. The most important works are almost always created by individuals that say: this is what I want to say. They then, in one way or another, find an audience to listen. There is nothing wrong with making audience selection explicit. People do it in business all the time.
What do you want to say? How do you want to say it? What are you best suited to say? It is often the case that successful individuals answer these questions in very explicit terms. There's no question that the ability to communicate within a wide range of contexts is useful, but there is no harm at all in knowing and leveraging you're strengths.
When the Audience Is or Is Not You
Understanding audience is also key in evaluating incoming information. Does this observation apply to me? Or, more often, how does this observation apply to me? In everything, there is a mainstream, and by definition, most discourse is directed at the mainstream. It is often more important for those outside the mainstream to understand it than it is for those within the mainstream to understand it. When within the mainstream, going with the flow is sufficient. Those outside the mainstream are almost always trying to figure out where it is going in order to get their first, rejoin it, or avoid it entirely.
Notes
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