[ABCOMM263] Lesson 5 & 6 – Informative and Positive Messages
and Adapting your Message to your Audience
05: INFORMATIVE AND POSITIVE MESSAGES
Informative messages – When you need to convey
information to which the receiver’s basic reaction will be
neutral.
Positive messages – If you convey information to which the
receiver reaction will be positive.
Primary Purpose of Informative and Positive Messages:
• To give information or good news to the receiver or to
measure the receiver
• To have the receiver view information positively
Secondary Purpose of Informative and Positive Messages:
• To build a good image of the sender
• To build a good image of the sender’s organization
• To cement a good relationship between the sender
and the receiver
• To deemphasize negative elements
• To reduce or eliminate future messages of the same
subject
Why use e-mail for sending positive and informative
messages?
• To accomplish routine, noncontroversial business
activities
• To save time: many people can look through 60-100
emails an hour
• To save money: one e-mail can go to many people,
including global teams
• To allow readers deal with messages at their
convenience, when timing is not crucial
• To communicate accurately
• To provide readers with details for reference
• To create a paper trail
Organizing Informative and Positive Messages
1. Start with good news or the most important
information.
2. Give details, clarification, and background.
3. Present any negative elements as positively as
possible.
4. Explain any benefits.
5. Use a goodwill ending: positive, personal, and
forward-looking.
Subject lines for Informative and Positive Messages
• Making subject lines specific
Too general: Training Sessions
Better: Dates for 2020 Training Sessions or Should we
schedule a short course on proposal writing?
• Making subject lines concise
Wordy: Survey of Student Preferences in Regard to Various
Pizza
Better: Students’ Pizza Preferences
Pointers for E-mail Messages
1. Use important information in the subject line. Most
people delete blanks and generic tags such as hello,
thank you, and next meeting.
2. Put good news in the subject line
3. Name drop to make a connection: Our Director gave
me your name
4. Make e-mail sound easy to deal with: Two Short
Travel Questions
E-mail Pet Peeves
• Missing or vague subject lines
• Too much information or too little information
• Too many instant message acronyms
• Lack of capitalization and punctuation
• Long messages without bullets
• Delayed responses
• People who never responds
• People who expect an immediate answer
Managing Information in your Messages
• If you send out regularly scheduled messages on the
same topic, such as monthly updates of training
seminars, try to develop a system that lets people
know immediately what’s new.
• Check your message for accuracy and completeness.
• Remember that e-mails are public documents and
may be widely forwarded.
Ending Informative and Positive Messages
• Use a paragraph that shows you see your reader as
an individual. Possibilities include complimenting the
reader for a job well done, describing a benefit, or
looking forward to something positive that relates to
the subject of the message.
• When you write to one person, make a good last
paragraph that fits that person so specifically that it
would not work if you sent the same basic message to
someone else or to a person with the same title in
another organization.
• When you write to someone who represents an
organization, the last paragraph can refer to your
company’s relationship to the reader’s organization.
Weak closing paragraph: Should you have any questions
regarding this matter, please feel free to call me.
 [ABCOMM263] Lesson 5 & 6 – Informative and Positive Messages
and Adapting your Message to your Audience

Goodwill paragraph: Many patients appreciate the freedom to 3. Secondary Audience - may be asked to comment on
leave the hospital for a few hours. It’s nice working with a your message.
hospital which is flexible enough to offer that option. 4. Gatekeeper - has the power to stop your message
before it gets to your audience.
Varieties of Informative and Positive Messages 5. Watchdog Audience - pays close attention to the
communication between you and the primary
1. Transmittals audience.
Organize a memo or letter of transmittal in this order:
- Tell the reader what you are sending. Audience and the Communication Process
- Summarize the main point of the document.
- Indicate any special circumstances or information
that would help the reader understand the
document.
- Tell the reader what will happen next.

2. Summaries
- You may be asked to summarize a conversation,
a document, or an outside meeting for colleagues
or superiors.
- In a summary of a conversation for internal use,
identify the people who were present, the topic of
discussion, decisions made, and who does what
next.
- To summarize a document, start with the main
point. Then go on to give supporting evidence or • Throughout the process, both sender and receiver
details. construct meaning together.
• Noise influences every part of the process.
3. Thank you and Positive feedback notes • Channel overload occurs when the channel cannot
handle all the messages being sent.
Adjustments and Responses to Complaints • Information overload occurs when more messages
are transmitted than the human receiver can handle.
• Angry customers expect organizations to show that • Successful communication depends on identifying
they are listening and want to resolve the problem. and establishing common ground between you and
When you grant a customer’s request for an adjusted your audience.
price, discount, replacement, or other benefit to
resolve a complaint, do so in the very first sentence. Analyzing Individuals and Members of the Groups
• Don’t talk about your own process in making decision.
Don’t say anything that sounds grudging. Give the 1. Their knowledge about your topic
reason for the original mistake only if it reflects credit 2. Their demographic factors
on the company. 3. Their personality
4. Their attitudes, values, beliefs
Words to avoid when responding to a complaint 5. Their past behavior

- “We’re busy” Prior Knowledge

- “It’s in our policy”
- “We can’t” 1. Preface statements with “as you know”
- “No” 2. Always spell out acronyms the first time you use them
3. Provide brief definitions in the text
06: ADAPTING YOUR MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE
Demographic Factors
Who is my Audience?
• Demographic characteristics can be objectively
In an organizational setting, a message may have five quantified, or measured, and include age, gender,
audiences. religion, education level, income, location, and so on.
• Businesses and governments use a variety of
1. Initial Audience - receives the message first and demographic data to forecast people’s behaviors, and
routes it to other audiences. to design their strategies accordingly.
2. Primary Audience – they will decide whether to act
on your message.
 [ABCOMM263] Lesson 5 & 6 – Informative and Positive Messages
and Adapting your Message to your Audience
Personality
• Introvert-Extrovert: Introverts get their energy from
within; extroverts are energized by interacting with
other people.
• Sensing-Intuitive: Sensing types gather information
systematically through their senses. Intuitive types
see relationships among ideas.
• Thinking-Feeling: Thinking types use objective logic
to reach decisions. Feeling types make decisions that
“feel right.”
• Judging-Perceiving: Judging types like organization
and prefer to finish one task before starting another.
Perceptive types like possibilities, like to keep their
options open.
Values and Beliefs
• Knowing what your audience finds important allows
you to organize information in a way that seems
natural to your audience, and to choose appeals that
audience members will find persuasive.
Past Behavior
• Experts in human behavior believe that we can
analyze and predict people’s future actions based on
their past behaviors: the more recent the behavior,
the more accurate the prediction.
Analyzing People in Organization
• What does the physical environment say about who
and what are valued?
• Where do the managers work? Do bosses dress
differently from other employees?
• How are employees treated?
• How do people in the organization communicate?
• What do people talk about?
• What kind of and how much evidence is needed to be
convincing?
The following questions will help you analyze an
organization’s culture:
• What are the organization’s goals?
• What does the organization value?
• How do people get ahead?
• How formal are behavior, language, and dress?
• What behavioral expectations predominate?
• Do employees speak in “I,” “we,” or “them and us”
language?
How do I use Audience Analysis?
Strategy
• Choose appeals that would work for the specific
audience.
• Use details and language that reflect your knowledge
of, and respect for the specific audience, the
organizational culture, and the discourse community.
• Make it easy for the audience to respond positively.
• Include only necessary information.
• Anticipate and overcome objections.
Organization
• Analyze your audience’s reaction to the meaning of
the message.
• Anticipate and meet the audience’s expectations of
format: make the organizational pattern clear to the
audience.
Style
• Strive for clarity and accessibility: use simple words, a
mixture of sentence lengths, and short paragraphs
with topic sentences.
• Use natural, conversational, personable, tactful
language: avoid negative, defensive, arrogant, and
“red-flag” words—unfortunately, fundamentalist,
crazy, incompetent, dishonest—that may generate a
negative reaction.
• Use the language that appeals to your audience.
• Use natural, conversational language.
Document Design
• Use headings, bulleted lists, and a mix of paragraph
lengths to create white space.
• Choose the format, footnotes, and visuals expected
by the organizational culture or the discourse
community.
Photographs and Visuals
• Use bias-free photographs.
• Choose photographs and illustrations that project
positive cultural meanings for your audience.
What if my Audience have different needs?
Content and Choice of Details
• Always provide an overview—the introductory
paragraph or topic sentence—for reader orientation.
• In the body of the document, provide enough
evidence to prove your point.
Organization
• Organize your message based on the primary
audience’s attitudes toward it: give good news up
front; provide the explanation before you deliver the
bad news
• Organize documents to make reading easy: provide a
table of contents for documents more than five pages
 [ABCOMM263] Lesson 5 & 6 – Informative and Positive Messages
and Adapting your Message to your Audience

long so that your readers can turn to the portions that

interest them.
• Use headings as signposts: use headings to tell
readers what they’re about to read and to connect
ideas throughout your document.

Level of Language

• Contemporary business communication uses

conversational, semiformal language.
• When both internal and external audiences will read
the document, use a slightly more formal style and the
third person; avoid I.
• Use a more formal style when you write to
international audiences.

Technical Terms

• Know what your reader knows, then provide only

the necessary information. Use technical terms only if
these will increase reader comprehension.
• Put background information and theory under
separate headings.
• If primary audiences will have more knowledge than
other audiences, provide a glossary of terms.