Know what you want your reader to do
Writing Guide >
The principle
Before you write, settle two things: who the reader is, and what you want that reader to do when they reach the end. Not a category of reader — a person, or the nearest thing to one: the chair, the chief executive, the chief finance officer, the audit committee. And not 'understand the position' but an action. Approve the price rises. Release the funds. Drop the project.
Everything else follows from those two answers. What to include, what to leave out, how much background, what belongs in the summary, what tone to strike are all determined by who you are writing to and what you want from them. If you’re not clear about the reader you risk writing a document that tries to serve everyone at once, which means it serves no one.
Many documents and reports name no reader and ask for nothing. They are addressed to a committee as an abstraction and end by inviting that committee to note the contents. That is the same failure seen from the other end in 'Ask for a decision, not a note'.
Why it fails in practice
Writing for everyone feels safe. Name one reader and you risk leaving others out. Ask for one decision and you might be told no. Keep the reader general and the ask soft and you have excluded nobody and committed to nothing. The document reads as thorough and even-handed. It is also inert.
But a reader can tell when a document is not for them. The finance director skims, because nothing in it asks them to do something in particular. The specialist skims, because the careful background is material they already know.
And the writer who cannot name the reader will find it difficult to name the purpose, too. The writer cannot decide what to include until they know who it is for and what they want the reader to do. The vague reader and the vague request travel together.
An example
A research paper on participatory budgeting in a sub-Saharan African country’s local government runs to 80 pages. It is thorough reporting on a statistical analysis of PEFA scores, and the analysis of dozens of interviews in the field. But if you read it asking yourself who is this for, and what does it want them to do, it comes apart.
The body of the paper is written to inform. It poses research questions and answers them, in the way a paper does for readers who want to understand a subject. The audience for this kind of paper would be academics working in the public financial management field.
The recommendations at the end of the paper are written almost as instructions, and they are aimed at entirely different actors. The first three recommendations are addressed to PEFA and international agencies, and the strongest asks PEFA to change a particular indicator in its framework — a specific request to a single, identifiable reader who could act on it. The last three are addressed to different stakeholders in the country. The recommendations are, in effect, bolted onto a paper that was written for a third party.
And with this example there is a deeper problem. The country is francophone and it is unlikely that government officials or community members would ever open an 80 page academic paper written in English, let alone understand it. They will never receive the recommendations intended for them.
What to do instead
Before you write a sentence decide who, exactly, this is for and what you want them to do when they finish. You can do this by completing the following sentence:
I want [this reader] to [do this].
Write that full sentence in your notes (not in the document) and let it govern your choices about what to include, what to cut, the order of the contents, etc.
If more than one reader genuinely needs the material, then you need more than one document. In the case of the above example, there could have been a submission to PEFA and a separate briefing for government. These would likely be different lengths, in different languages, making different asks.
That sounds like more work. Maybe, but maybe not. When you write for one reader exactly what they need you probably write less. And however much you end up writing, you can be much more confident that the reader will read your words and understand what you want them to do.