It’s difficult to consider a piece of written communication without a purpose. Even if you are just scribbling down random thoughts, you have a purpose: to express your own ideas. Self-expression is a common purpose for written texts, but it’s not usually the focus in academic and professional settings. In fact, you may have to sublimate your personal feelings if the situation calls for it. For instance, no matter how strongly you feel about being billed incorrectly for your internet service, abusive language or profanity in business correspondence to your service provider is generally not effective and may undermine your purpose entirely.

A clear understanding of purpose can help you decide how to bring effective design to your pages. Unfocused publications don’t communicate effectively, just as unclear, disorganized, or poorly supported arguments rarely persuade a reader. Before you fire up the software and start creating off the top of your head, spend some time articulating your purpose. Are you trying to inform? Persuade? Instruct? What is the best format for achieving your purpose? For example, trying to explain how to shoot a free throw in prose only, with no visuals, is incredibly difficult no matter how skilled you are as a writer. The best way to teach people how to shoot free throws is to take them to the basketball court and let them try it. Achieving your purpose may require diagrams, graphics, or video.

“Sylvia Fowles Free Throw” by Laurie Shaull (Licensed CC BY-SA 2.0)

Also consider how many purposes you can manage at once, especially if your text needs to be brief. A single short brochure that attempts to advertise the services at a community center, encourage healthy eating habits, and persuade the audience of the benefits of a municipal bond measure will probably fail on all counts. That’s too much to cover in a short publication, and the topics are disparate. A brief booklet that explains the ins and outs of kitesurfing in Kailua will accomplish a lot more than a general “Travel in Hawaii” brochure, which is likely to be pretty but not terribly informative. Specific, focused content is nearly always more helpful and interesting to a reader. Avoid trying to do too much in a short format.

Sometimes your purpose is set for you. Readers of a business plan, for example, expect certain information: an executive summary, a rundown of marketing strategies, financial requirements and assets, and a description of how the business will function.

Failing to understand your purpose (and your audience’s needs, which drive your purpose) can cause you to produce a publication that readers can’t use. Think of a garage sale sign with no dates and no address. Similarly, a flyer for a kids’ soccer camp that doesn’t tell parents what equipment campers need or include a schedule of the daily program will result in numerous phone calls and emails from rightfully annoyed parents. Information that involves dates should also include what day of the week the date refers to. An email blast that says “save the date” and lists a date sometime next month with no indication of what day of the week the date falls on will likely get skipped and maybe forgotten because readers can’t see at a glance if the event meshes well with their weekly schedule. The easier you make it for your readers to take an action, the more likely they are to do so.

Most professional publishers plan scrupulously, then produce many drafts and get sufficient feedback to ensure that their purpose is achieved. Publications like brochures, booklets, and posters are “mocked up,” or sketched out in advance, to determine what can be covered in the available space, how many images or photos are needed, and how much text is required. Professionals who produce Web sites or publications know what they want to achieve before they ever write a word. Creating a publication requires you to think in advance about your purpose, concept, audience, goals, format, and material needs (images, graphics, text, headlines, color schemes, etc.). In the end, time spent planning and analyzing pays off in time saved producing.