DEFINING YOUR PURPOSE

What do you want your document to do?

This is a very different question from asking: What's the document about?

At work, we write to get results. This means that thinking about the document's subject is unhelpful. You could, after all, write huge amounts of material about any subject. You can only narrow the options by identifying the document's purpose: what you want it to do.

Distinguish carefully between:

• what you want to achieve;
• what you want the reader to do;
• what you want the document to do.