Most content is intended for several audiences (eg experts as well as general readers, teachers as well as students, health professionals as well as health administrators).
Communicating information to any audience calls for judgment on what they will want or need to know. This affects the amount and technical level of the information you present, as well as the way you pitch the information.
When you write for general and specialised audiences separately, you can pitch the text to the appropriate level (ie less technical for the general public, more technical for the experts):
If you are writing information about the government’s immunisation programs:
content for health professionals might include demographic information about the take-up of vaccines, and details about vaccine effectiveness and vaccine side effects
content for parents might be the ages at which their children should have each type of vaccination, the diseases that vaccines protect against and why vaccination is important.
In contrast, when both general and specialised audiences will read the same text, it is challenging to write for their different priorities, as well as for the different reading skill levels in the community, and for the special access needs of some readers. A 2-step process will help to ensure that you meet all the needs of your audiences:
- Ensure that the information needs of all your audiences are met.
- Consider how to present information in a way that will engage all your audiences. Options include
- ‘layering’ the same information in different formats within the same piece of text (eg including a summary box at the start of a chapter or webpage, and more detailed information further down)
- developing separate documents (eg a fact sheet for the general public and a more detailed report for researchers)
- developing separate online pathways (eg labelling online content as ‘For patients’ and ‘For practitioners’).