Who are you communicating to?

I recently wrote a document that was totally in the style of this newsletter. I try to be a little catchy and conversational while (hopefully) providing information or knowledge. It went under review and I was nervous for a few minutes.

Are they going to think it's too informal? Too cutesy? That they're too serious for the way I write?

And while the jury is still out on that (at least one person said that it was great ??), it reminded me of who we do our communications for. They're not for us; they're for the people; our audience.

You might be thinking, "Well duh, Emily, of course they are." Or maybe, and I'm trying to channel the brain rot kids here, "Don't be so skibidi, Em."

But sometimes, as experts, we get caught up in the weeds of what we're doing because the details matter. Whether it's an update on infrastructure or the rollout of a new training program, how your audience communicates and what's relevant to them that matters most.

Let's use the following example (thanks ChatGPT for spinning this up for me):

"Leveraging microservices architecture enables the decoupling of complex systems into independently deployable modules, facilitating enhanced scalability, resilience, and iterative development cycles within cloud-native environments."

Whoa. For a Software Architect, their response might be, "Awesome." ??

For an end-user, this might be more like their response:

For an end-user, it could be reworked and stated like,

"Using microservices lets you break big systems into smaller, easier-to-manage pieces. This helps you make updates more easily, scale up as needed, and keep improving your system in the cloud."

So how do I (and how can you) check yourself to make sure that the information is read?

There are a few questions I ask myself when I have technical information to convey:

1. Who's in my audience?
2. Does this directly or indirectly apply to my audience?
3. What's the 'so what' (the impact) for them?
4. Am I giving them enough notice?
5. What's the call to action and timeline?

BONUS 1: Can I make the title/subtitle snappy so it catches people's attention?

BONUS 2: Double check that I don't have a long amount of text or a wall of text (where it needs to be broken up into paragraphs/have white space).

Remembering that we're all humans and that humans take in information in all kinds of ways, that our attention is being split at all times (or so it seems), and that as long as it's professional, we can talk like people and not robots.