The content of your communication is not what you intend to say but what your audience understands. Put another way, if you mean to say one thing and your audience picks up another, you have failed terribly in your writing.
As such, it is important to fine-tune your writing such that you are able to deliver your message without confusing your recipients. One of the best ways to achieve that is by understanding their language and filtering what you write through that.
Learn Their Jargon
Groups of people each develop their own sets of jargon that make communicating with those in their field much easier than using more general terms. For instance, while you may refer to your NAS media storage at home as a “server” when talking with your friends, you will probably need to refer to it as a “media server NAS” when writing for an audience of computer professionals to avoid any confusion. Make sure you run your piece through an English software to make sure you’re not putting together phrases that won’t likely make sense to anyone.
Match Their Tone
How would your target audience write when composing a message to their peers? Match the tone of how you imagine that to be. If you’re writing to an audience of CEOs and vice presidents, a formal tone will obviously need to be adopted. Similarly, writing to an audience of college kids on Facebook will probably require a less serious and more jovial quality.
Learn how your audience speaks and match it. That’s the best way to ensure communication that gets its message across.
Tags: composing a message, content of your communication, sets of jargon, understanding their language
