Lecture Notes: Purpose, Genre, & Audience

Analysis Comes First

Every technical document answers three questions. What is it for? What kind of document is it? Who reads it?

Those questions name the three terms of technical writing analysis: purpose, genre, and audience. Analysis is the first step of the writing process, and it comes before research, before structure, and before drafting. What you decide here determines what you will need to find out, how the document will be organized, and what will count as a successful result.

A document written without this analysis can be clear, correct, and well proofread and still fail. Writing quality is not the same thing as fitness to a situation.

Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation

Writing is situational. The situation comes first and calls the document into being.

Lloyd Bitzer argues that a work of rhetoric comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself, and that it functions to produce action or change in the world. Discourse does not create the occasion for its own existence. The situation precedes it and determines what will count as a fitting response. The method follows from the claim: locate the problem that requires a response, identify the people who can act on it, and inventory the conditions that limit what may be said.

Exigence

The exigence is the reason the document needs to exist. Bitzer defines it as an imperfection marked by urgency: something is wrong, or lacking, or undecided, and it requires attention now.

Not every exigence is rhetorical. A leak in a hull and a field of ripe corn are both urgent imperfections, but neither is corrected by discourse. An exigence is rhetorical when it can be modified by persuading someone to think or act differently. Exigence also governs the kind of response that is appropriate. An occasion that calls for an apology is not satisfied by an accusation, and an occasion that calls for a recommendation is not satisfied by a summary.

Audience

Because rhetoric produces change by influencing the decisions and actions of persons, it requires an audience. Bitzer restricts the rhetorical audience to those who are capable of being influenced and capable of acting on the exigence, which is narrower than the set of people who might read the document.

A writer who objects to a university policy and addresses students has chosen an audience that already agrees and cannot act. The same argument addressed to administrators reaches an audience with the authority to change the policy.

Constraints

Constraints are the persons, events, objects, and relations that have the power to limit the decision and action needed to modify the exigence. Bitzer lists beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, and motives. Some constraints are given by the situation, and some the writer introduces.

Constraints are not obstacles to be resented. Knowing that an audience distrusts a source, or that a decision has to fit inside a fixed budget, tells a writer in advance which approaches will fail — before time is spent drafting them.

Miller and Genre

Situations recur, and recurrence produces typified responses.

Bitzer’s schema has no term for the document itself. Carolyn Miller supplies it. Genre is the name for a recognizable kind of document that a community uses to respond to a recurring kind of situation. An organization does not invent a new form each time an employee proposes a project; it produces a proposal, because proposals are what that organization has learned to produce when that situation arises.

A genre is defined by the action it performs, not by its features. A memo and a progress report can share the same headings, length, and layout and still be different genres, because one authorizes something and the other records something. The question that identifies a genre is what the document does, not what it contains. It follows that genres belong to the people who use them: the genres that matter in a workplace are the ones that workplace actually produces and names, not the categories a textbook assigns after the fact.

Purpose, Genre, & Audience

These three terms are the working form of the rhetorical situation in technical writing.

Purpose carries Bitzer’s exigence into the writer’s control. Audience carries his audience. Genre names the document that joins the two. Constraints are not a fourth step; they operate inside each of the three.

Technical writing	Bitzer	Miller
Purpose	exigence	exigence joined to private intention
Genre	—	typified rhetorical action
Audience	audience	community of users
Constraints	constraints	distributed across all three

Purpose

Purpose is the action a document performs on the situation that required it.

Purpose takes the form of a verb and a result — to authorize, to instruct, to warn, to recommend — never a subject matter. “This report is about the server migration” names a topic, not a purpose. Purpose is also bounded by what the writer can legitimately accomplish: authority, fact, and regulation set a ceiling no document can write its way past.

Genre

Genre is the kind of document a recurring situation calls for.

Genre is the recognizable answer a community has settled on for a recurring problem — a proposal, a progress report, a set of instructions, a memo — not an invention made fresh each time. Each genre plays a distinct role and occupies a distinct place: instructions sit beside the equipment they describe, a report goes into a file, a proposal opens a decision. Genre also constrains, fixing expected length, structure, and formality in advance.

Audience

The technical writer composes from the reader’s position rather than the writer’s.

A document is read because a reader needs to decide, build, fix, or approve something, and it succeeds only if it gets that reader there. Most documents reach more than one audience with different needs, and one of them is primary.

Readers also constrain the document. Their available time bounds its length, their technical knowledge bounds its vocabulary, and the conditions they read under — at a desk, on a phone, on a shop floor — bound its format.

Conducting a PGA Analysis

Work through the three terms in order, then check them against each other.

Purpose has to come first. Until you know what the document is supposed to do, you cannot tell which genre performs that action or which readers are the ones who can act on it. Once all three are set, read them against each other: if the genre does not serve the purpose, or the purpose does not reach a reader who can act, that is a problem to fix before drafting, not one to discover partway through a draft.

Analyzing for purpose

Start with the situation, not the document. Identify what problem or event made a document necessary, then work out what would have to change for that problem to be resolved. State that change as one sentence beginning with an action verb — if the sentence will not come, what you have is a topic, not a purpose yet. Then test it: authority, fact, and regulation set the ceiling on what the writer could actually accomplish, so check the sentence against that ceiling before moving on.

Questions that can help:

What has happened, or what problem exists, that makes this document necessary?
What single verb describes what this document does?
What should be different once this document has been read and acted on?
What role should this document play in a larger process or organization?
What work would this document be expected to accomplish?

Analyzing for genre

Analyzing genre means comparing candidates, not picking the first one that comes to mind. List the genres that could plausibly carry the purpose already identified, then find two or three real examples of the leading candidate — produced in the same kind of setting, if possible — and check what they share: length, structure, what appears first, what a reader scans for rather than reads. Confirm the genre actually performs the purpose; a hazard filed inside a routine progress report has failed its purpose no matter how well it is written.

Questions that can help:

Given the purpose already identified, which genre is actually built to accomplish that action?
Given the audience already identified, which genre reaches that reader in the way they need to be reached — read at a desk, consulted mid-task, filed for later?
What features of this genre make it suited to the job — its length, its structure, how quickly it can be read, where it physically or digitally sits?
Would a different genre accomplish the same purpose better, and what would be gained or lost in switching to it?
Does this genre’s typical length and structure match what this situation actually requires, or is the situation being forced into a genre that doesn’t fit it?
What would readers assume this document does simply from recognizing its genre, before reading a word of it?

Analyzing for audience

Analyzing audience starts with a list, not a guess. Name every reader the document will reach, including those who receive it indirectly, then rank them: the reader who can act on the purpose is primary, and everyone else is secondary. For the primary reader, work out what they already know, why they are reading, and what conditions they will be reading under — that last one is the constraint writers forget, and it is often what decides format.

Questions that can help:

Given the purpose already identified, who is the one reader who can actually act on it?
Does the genre already chosen assume a particular reader — and is that the reader this document actually needs to reach?
What does this reader already know, and what do they need explained before the document’s purpose can land?
Why is this reader reading — to learn something, to find one answer, or to perform a task in the moment?
What limits does this reader impose — time available, technical vocabulary, or the conditions they’ll read under — that will shape how the genre gets used?

Elena’s Analysis

Elena Reyes works the IT service desk at a regional insurance company with about 1,400 employees.

Last year the company split IT into three groups — service desk, applications support, and infrastructure — and built a clear intranet page explaining who handles what. Calls are still going to the wrong group: 358 of March’s 612 requests were misrouted, each one losing about two days. Elena checks the ticket data and finds the pattern — nearly every misrouted call comes from someone whose computer will not turn on or connect. The intranet page cannot help them, because they cannot open it.

Purpose. What would have to change for this problem to be resolved? An employee whose computer is down reaches the right group on the first call, without needing a working computer to find out who to call. She writes it as one sentence: direct employees to the correct group when they cannot get online. Then she tests it against the ceiling — she can only use the three official group names, anything company-wide needs sign-off from communications, and her budget tops out at what her manager can approve himself. The sentence still holds inside those limits, so the purpose is set.

Genre. She lists the candidates that could carry this purpose — email, the intranet page, the ticket form, a printed card — and checks each against a reader with no working computer. The first three fail immediately: all require a screen. What is left has to be something physical, already at the desk, before anything breaks. Comparing her options, a mousepad wins over a laminated card or a sticker: every desk already has one, it sits under the hands the moment someone reaches for a dead machine, and nobody throws it away. The genre she has landed on sets its own limits — one printed surface, no updates once it ships — so staff names are out, but the three group numbers, which rarely change, stay in.

Audience. She lists every reader this will reach and ranks them. Primary is the employee mid-failure — frustrated, in a hurry, staring at a dead screen. What they know is their symptom, not which group owns it, and the condition they are reading under — a dead machine, no time to spare — rules out anything but a glance. So she organizes by symptom: screen or hardware, can’t log in, claims or policy apps down. Secondary are the three group leads, who confirm their line before it prints, and communications, who signs off on layout. What she still needs before drafting: scope boundaries from each lead and the symptom wording from March’s tickets. That is her research.

Where This Goes Next

Analysis is the first step in the technical writing process, and every step that follows depends on what it produces.

Purpose, genre, and audience are decisions rather than givens, and they are interdependent: address a different reader and the expected genre changes with them; choose a different genre and it opens or closes what the document can accomplish. Once the three are established, the analysis has identified what you do not yet know, and research can begin.

Sources & Further Reading

Everything referenced above, if you want to go to the originals.

Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation”, Philosophy & Rhetoric 1.1 (1968) — source of exigence, audience, and constraints, and of the claim that discourse is called into existence by situation.
Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984) — source of genre as typified rhetorical action, genre as the mediator between private intention and social exigence, and genres as categories belonging to the communities that use them.
Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action (1984), Revisited 30 Years Later (2014)”, Letras & Letras 31.3 (2015) — source of the point that the medium is not the genre.
“Plan Your Persuasive Strategy | Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation” (video) — assigned viewing, embedded at the top of this page. Source of the worked examples in the Bitzer section, including the university policy and the practical-versus-rhetorical exigence.
“Audience and Technical Writing” (video) — assigned viewing, embedded in the Audience section. Source of accommodating information to the user, the single and multiple audience material, the reader profile questions, reading tasks, and production constraints.