Preparing to get your message out

Before committing a single word to paper, you should make preparations that are more akin to project development than to document writing. You should decide:

• the message that you want to communicate,
• the audience to whom you want to communicate it,
• the best way to package the message for this target audience.

This may all seem pretty banal, but dissemination efforts often fail simply because this preparatory work has not been done thoroughly.

The message

Unless you are preparing a compendium or stocktaking

The audience

Next, take some time to define your key

Packaging

The previous example already introduced different forms of

Drawing up a skeleton

Once the first questions have been answered, it