WHO ARE THE USERS?: Media Representations as Audience-Analysis Teaching Tools

Although usually meant to be humorous, this clichè underscores a truism: Instruction manuals are often unhelpful and difficult to understand. In fact, the quote’s bitter tone suggests that customers feel alienated from technological products and that they blame such alienation on flawed instruction manuals. Of course, the technical communicators who write these instruction manuals do not set out to alienate customers; in fact, just the opposite tends to be true—most technical communicators consider themselves to be user advocates. Nevertheless, many technical manuals are, indeed, unintelligible to their intended readers. This problem affects two kinds of stakeholders. Obviously, unintelligible documentation