Now, professional writing is a four-step process: thinking and analysis, planning, drafting, and editing. By following this step-wise process, we can reduce stress, produce more effective documents, and hopefully, do so in less time.

Now that we have completed the analysis, we are going to look at the planning, and later in the course, we will look at turning that plan into a draft and editing that text, so planning.

One way to get focused is to just focus on the subject, purpose, and reader (SPR). This is very useful if we are doing shorter documents where we do not need to make a very detailed plan, but just to make sure we include everything.

That means that in our writing, knowing the subject means we can make that clear, which helps us achieve the objective.

Thinking about the reader, what is our relationship to the reader? That is going to affect the style that we use, and what is their level in terms of power distance and so forth? Think about how much the reader already knows about the topic. Can you use terminology? Is there any essential information that you would need to give that reader? And think about your reader's priorities. What is important for them? What will persuade them? What kind of evidence do you need to achieve your purpose?

When we think about purpose, why are we writing? If we are writing to inform, always question what is the value of that information, because we never write purely to inform; we are always writing to create some kind of change or some kind of action. Perhaps we want to persuade our reader to take a particular recommendation, in which case, what is our key argument? What is the evidence that will persuade that reader? What kind of supporting information are we going to need, and what are the main points that will get our message across?

If we have a specific action in mind, we need to be clear about what action, how it will be carried out, and why that would be of benefit for the reader to take that action.

Let us imagine for this particular case, that we are writing to a non-expert audience, the analysis of children in Nepal is to be included in our organization's published material, and the target audience is going to be their fundraising base, their membership, perhaps in the US or perhaps the UK or Europe. Therefore, we need to think about what is the subject, purpose, and reader.

The subject clearly is children in Nepal, the purpose is to persuade, to gain support, but the reader themselves, they may not be particularly expert on some of these issues, so we have to bear that in mind.

A very good step to take at this point, especially when we are writing to a general audience, is what we call reader profiling. When we have multiple readers, it does help us if we focus on a particular reader, even an imaginary reader, and create a profile so that we are aiming to the center of that audience. That means going through a few possible questions just to get us more clear about who we are writing to, and that might include whether they are male or female, their age, their nationality, their education, even their marital status and family, their profession, their interests and hobbies, their knowledge of world issues, development issues, and our relationship with them.

If we were to apply the reader profiling example to our audience for the case study, the example that I am giving you, we are imagining that we are writing for fundraising, so we are writing to a very general audience, but let us be more specific.

Our target person at the 'center' of that audience, let us say, is more likely to be female, in the 35-45 year old age group, married, with children herself, certainly university educated, a professional working perhaps in law or health - let us be as specific as possible. Her hobbies may include yoga, painting ... who knows? Her knowledge of international affairs may be very good, mainly gained from the press and television, and she may have some understanding of some important development issues related to children, but not the level of an expert.

Note: I shared this exercise with a fundraising manager of an INGO. Her response was that, yes, this was actually a very accurate profile of their core supporter demographic.