Technical Communication

Information Technology Management· 3 CUs· E011

Performance assessmentDue Jun 9, 2027

Lessons0 / 10

Audience analysis

Written communication

Presentation

Visualizing data

Audience analysis

Who reads and what they need

15 min

Same IT issue, different message per audience. Analysis comes before writing.

Audience	Knows	Needs	Format
Executives	Business goals; little technical detail	Impact, cost, risk, decision	One-page summary, BLUF, 3 to 5 slides
Managers	Their area's processes	Effect on team, timeline, resources	Memo, status report
Technical staff	Systems, terms	Exact steps, configs, root cause	Runbook, technical report
End users	Their tasks	What changes for them, what to do	Short email, FAQ, quick guide
External (customers, regulators)	Varies	Plain facts, obligations met	Notice, formal letter

Curse of knowledge: experts forget what others do not know. Define every acronym once; cut jargon for nontechnical readers.

Audience analysis: Identifying readers' roles, knowledge, needs and attitudes before writing.
Curse of knowledge: An expert's difficulty imagining what a novice does not know.

A ransomware incident must be reported to the CFO. Lead with:

Which question belongs in audience analysis?

Notes for older courses C948 and C768 describe different tasks.

Content

Task details

Citations

APA

Graded by

Rubric

The four audience types: experts, technicians, executives and nonspecialists. Executives make the decisions but often know as little technically as nonspecialists.
SUNY ESC Technical Writing, audience
For a mixed audience, write each section for the readers who need it and use headings to route them, or move technical detail to appendices.
SUNY ESC Technical Writing, audience
BLUF, bottom line up front: open with the conclusion or request, then the support. Building up to the conclusion is the opposite order.
Wikipedia, BLUF
Active voice says who does what: "You must do it," not "It must be done."
Digital.gov plain language guide
Line chart for trends over time, bar chart to compare categories, scatter plot for the relationship between two numeric variables.
ApX data visualization course
A pie chart shows parts of a whole and gets hard to read past five or six slices; use a bar chart then.
ApX data visualization course
Never let color alone carry meaning in a chart; add labels, markers or patterns (WCAG 1.4.1).
W3C WCAG 2.1, 1.4.1

Tips

Read the rubric first. Match each heading or slide to one rubric aspect, in order.
Name the audience in every task and show how it changed word choice, detail and format.
Presentation recording: camera and slides captured together in Panopto; narration over slides alone is not accepted.
Put speaker notes in the slide notes pane; students reported using them while presenting without penalty.
Use Panopto side-by-side layout so the camera does not cover slide content.
After recording, confirm the video saved to the E011 folder before submitting the link.
Visuals: title states the takeaway, axes labeled, source cited, readable in grayscale.
Cite outside sources in APA, in text and in a reference list.

Study hours

45 h

Lessons

2 h 45 min

SourcesUpdated Nov 4, 2026