Communicating with nontechnical audiences: How much do they know?

The importance of approaching an audience as a rhetorical consideration of the intended reader´s community and its cultural contexts for writing is explored. An approach is presented to audience analysis that examines the nontechnical reader´s community culture using three questions: How does this reader´s community value my subject? What writing conventions operate in this reader´s community? How much background knowledge is a member of this community likely to have? The author describes how a technical writer can choose an appeal based on values shared with the intended reader, and then present shared and new information in ways that accommodate the reader´s needs for understanding unfamiliar technical subjects