The Audience Hierarchy

A method to improve Help

June 6, 2013

By Ryan Petersen Contact: rfpete@gmail.com Web: linkedin.com/in/rfpetersen

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Introduction
To consistently create Help that is clear, concise, and easy to read, writers need a general method. This white paper introduces one such method: the Audience Hierarchy. It was developed to revise existing Help pages that already contained the necessary information for readers. But because of writing that was dense and unclear, this potentially helpful content was obscured. In this paper, the Audience Hierarchy method is used to revise and improve Help for a web tool called Collect It. Collect It is a web tool that manages files. It was developed by the University of Washington IT team for the benefit of instructors and students who use it to organize and submit homework and similar documents. Collect It, which works as a drop box, is a relatively simple tool that provides a convenient alternative to paper documents and e-mail attachments. This white paper first provides an overview of the Collect It Help problems. Next, the solution to these problems the Audience Hierarchy method is developed. Finally, after the conclusion, a fully revised Help page is shown in the Appendix.

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Problem
Collect It Help has one main problem the writing is more difficult to understand than it needs to be. This problem is a matter of writing style and stems from the lack of a defined and consistent audience.

Vague and abstract writing

Collect It is a convenient and relatively simple tool. However, the Help writing is too vague and abstract, which makes it difficult for readers to understand who uses the tool and for what purpose. The problem is not the content but how it is described. In other words, the Help content seems complex because of the writing style. Noted writing-style expert Joseph M. Williams says, if you surround a less familiar abstract character with a lot of other abstractions, readers may feel that your writing is unnecessarily dense and complex. The following sentence, copied directly from the Collect It Help Center, is a good example of unnecessarily dense and complex writing: With Collect It, owners and their collaborators can easily receive, access, track, store, and download participants submitted files. Vague, abstract characters like owners and their collaborators are more difficult for the reader to understand than simply, instructors. Likewise, participants is more difficult to understand than students. Because of these abstractions, the content of Collect It Help is hard to read. The words instructor and student are used occasionally, but vague nouns like owners, participants, users, and others are used more often. Readers want clear subjects such as instructors and students, concrete subjects that help readers visualize how the web tool works.

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Inconsistent audience
Much of Collect It Help is written with vague, confusing terms because the writing has no clear audience. Mike Markel, author of the popular textbook Technical Communication, stresses: Audience and purpose determine everything about how you communicate on the job. And the job for Help is to clearly explain what the tool can do for the reader. The likely reader, or audience, is either an instructor or a student. In the example sentence above, the instructor typically receives files whereas the student submits them. So by using these specific terms, the reader no longer has to deduce the identity of the owner and participant making the writing noticeably clearer.

Solution
Table 1, below, provides an overview of the solution objectives.

Table 1: Improving Collect It Help

Objective Create an Audience Hierarchy Description This method helps the writer revise or create Help content. It defines audience, characters, and actions. The benefits of using the Audience Hierarchy are shown by comparing original and revised sentences. The revised writing is clearer and more concise.

Apply the Audience Hierarchy

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Create an Audience Hierarchy

The Audience Hierarchy method was created and then used to revise two Collect It Help pages. The hierarchy has three tiers that are ordered by importance: audience, characters, and actions. The idea that good writing needs characters and actions comes from Williams book Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. To create the Audience Hierarchy, these ideas were combined with the more general idea that good writing begins with defining an audience. The primary audience must be explicitly defined. Once defined, this most likely reader occupies the top hierarchy tier: Audience. For Collect It, this reader is either an instructor or a student. Both use the tool, but an instructor is much more likely to set up a Collect It drop box and, before doing so, read the Help content. Instructors also generate a large number of new Collect It users, namely students. For these reasons, Collect It Help should be written using instructors as the main audience. Designating instructors as the primary audience benefits all readers, not just instructors. For example, compare these two sentences: ! Owners create assignments for users to retrieve. ! Instructors create assignments for students to retrieve. The second sentence is clearer. Even a student reader, who is not the primary audience, benefits from content that is written with an explicit audience in mind. A defined audience is the most important part of the Audience Hierarchy, but there are two other important tiers: Characters and Actions. Clear writing tells a story, even if the story is about a person using a web tool. And a story needs characters, real characters such as instructors and students rather than vague abstractions like users and participants. In grammatical terms, these characters are usually the subject of a sentence. Thus, the middle tier of the Audience Hierarchy is Characters. Instructors and students are the words most often used as subjects of the revised Help. These two are the main characters in the Audience Hierarchy. Also, although not a concrete character, Collect It must occasionally be used as a subject.

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To complete the Collect It story, the characters need to accomplish tasks. And to accomplish tasks, characters need to perform actions. In grammatical terms, actions are the verbs in the sentences. Some typical verbs used include: upload, download, receive, sort, organize, add, and track. Thus, the bottom tier of the Audience Hierarchy is Actions. Figure 1, below, shows the complete Audience Hierarchy, which has three tiers.

Figure 1: The Audience Hierarchy shows audience (readers), characters (subjects), and actions (verbs)

The most important tier, the defined audience, is at the top. In the middle tier, the box for Instructors is larger than the boxes for Students and Collect It because Instructors are the main characters, the most frequent sentence subject. Likewise, a majority of the Help verbs relate to Instructors and, thus, occupy the largest number of boxes in the bottom tier. The Audience Hierarchy was used to revise Collect It Help.

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Apply the Audience Hierarchy

Easy-to-understand Help is created by, first, defining the audience, then, writing with characters who use the software to perform tasks, or actions. Applying this Audience Hierarchy leads to concise, clear Help. Table 2, below, shows existing content that was revised by applying the Audience Hierarchy. The revised sentences are both shorter and clearer.

Table 2: Applying the Audience Hierarchy

Original Sentences With Collect It, owners and their collaborators can easily receive, access, track, store, and download participants submitted files. Particularly with students, it is also nice to let participants know who will have access to their work and how/when they should expect to receive feedback. As a Collect It dropbox owner, you can control the availability of an assignment. Participant submissions to assignments are organized into a table. ! Revised Sentences Collect It allows instructors to easily receive, access, track, store, and download files submitted by students. Let your students know who will have access to their work and how and when they should expect to receive feedback. Instructors can control the availability of an assignment. Student files are organized into a table. Words Deleted 2

Total Words Deleted:

15

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By applying the Audience Hierarchy to the four example sentences in Table 2, a total of 15 words were deleted. This is a 25% reduction. Decreasing the word count leads to uncluttered Help that can be read more quickly. More importantly, this concision is accomplished while also making the content easier to understand. For this white paper, an existing Help page was revised using the Audience Hierarchy. Similar to the examples shown in Table 2, the revised page uses about 25% fewer words than the original. Both the revised original page can be found in the Appendix.

Conclusion
Effective Help contains writing that is clear and concise. And to create effective Help, authors need a reliable plan, or method. This report introduced one such method, the Audience Hierarchy. The Audience Hierarchy has three tiers: audience, characters, and actions. In this white paper, the three tiers associated with Collect It, a web tool, are defined. Collect It Help is then revised. The resulting Help page is less cluttered, can be read quickly, and can be understood easily.

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Bibliography
Markel, Mike (2012). Technical Communication. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. Williams, Joseph M. and Colomb, Gregory G. (2010). Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Boston, MA: Longman.

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Appendix
Appendix A contains the revised and improved Collect It Help: Managing Assignments with Collect It. To create this page, the Audience Hierarchy method was used to revise and combine the content of the two existing Help pages, which are shown in Appendix B. Appendix B contains the existing Collect It Help: About Collect It dropboxes and Managing Assignments and Projects with Collect It. The text shown was copied directly from the Internet, and then formatted in Microsoft Word.

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