In this lesson you learn what to include in the background section of your document to appropriately set the stage for the balance of your memo.
The background of a memo immediately follows the overview and provides the facts and assumptions relevant to the subject of your document. These facts and assumptions enable your reader to react to your recommendation or conclusions appropriately. After reading the background, your reader should …
Quickly understand the current or historical context necessary to evaluate your recommendation(s) or conclusion(s), regardless of the level of prior familiarity.
Clearly understand what portion of information included is based on data and what portion is based on your assumptions or hypotheses.
Accurately understand your frame of reference for the recommendation(s) or conclusion(s).
By providing your summary of the situation before your recommendation or rationale, you enable your reader to appropriately evaluate your recommendations/conclusions and rationale/key findings.
Providing background information aids several types of readers:
If the reader is not familiar with the situation, you have equipped her with the necessary background to continue reading.
If the reader has an understanding of the situation that differs from yours, you have enabled her to consider the upcoming information based on your point of view.
If the reader has an understanding of the situation that differs from yours and is the basis for disagreeing with your recommendation or conclusion, you have maintained some level of credibility.
The background is typically one paragraph. For complex issues or major recommendations, you may expand the background to several paragraphs. Also, in cases where you include assumptions based on your analysis of the situation, you should clearly indicate that these are your assumptions and why they are relevant.
There are two key questions to consider when deciding what information to include in the background and what information you may safely omit. The first question concerns what facts are pertinent to the subject of the document. The second concerns how much knowledge the reader already has, and thus doesn't need to have repeated.
Adequately addressing these two questions is a balancing act. The correct balance depends on the complexity of the issues your document addresses, the importance of the document, and whether the document is likely to be distributed further by the original recipients.
As a rule of thumb, the more complex, more important, and more likely to be forwarded the document is, the less you should assume your audience knows about your subject, and thus, the more information you should provide in the Background.
Suppose you're the manager of the leading brand of shortening used for baking and frying foods. You're writing a memo to recommend a specific action plan to increase shortening usage in both baking and frying. Volume in the shortening category has been declining steadily for many years, and although your brand is dominant in the category, the brand's volume has been declining at roughly the same rate as the category. This information is probably well known to anyone in the management of the company, particularly since it's been going on for many years, and is therefore probably not an important fact to include in the background of your document.
Plain English
An action plan is the set of steps you plan to take to achieve some specified goal. The steps should follow one another in sequential order, and proceed logically to establishing the goal.
However, suppose category-wide use of shortening in baking has recently begun declining much more rapidly than its use in frying. While people who work directly with your division may know this, it's likely that people in the company who are not as closely aligned with the division may not, and thus, the rapid decline in baking usage may be an important background fact.
Using this same example, suppose a competitor, in the past six months, introduced a new shortening product that directly competes with yours for both baking and frying. At the same time, suppose the American Butter Institute has begun a nationwide campaign that promotes the use of butter in baking.
Clearly, both of these developments are important to the brand. The competitor's entry into the market is unlikely to have had a negative effect on the category's volume, but may have an effect on your brand's volume. If so, you should include this information.
Tip
If your background section seems too long, check to ensure that your document focuses on a single important issue. If you discover you're writing about two or more separate issues at once, break the document into separate ones—each focused exclusively on a single issue.
On the other hand, use of butter in baking could clearly impact shortening use in terms of category volume. So for the purpose of this memo, the American Butter Institute's marketing campaign should probably be included in the background, whereas the competition's new product may not need to be mentioned.
The background may include both facts and important assumptions. In the previous example, you may have included certain facts about the decline of the shortening category such as, "Frying volume is down 2 percent versus last year, whereas baking volume is down 11 percent." At the same time, you may also have included certain assumptions about the business—in this case, "We believe the recent campaign by the American Butter Institute has significantly increased the use of butter in baking at the expense of shortening."
When you state facts, you should, as often as possible, cite the source of the facts. In the preceding example, the sentence would read, "According to Nielsen data for this year, frying volume is down." Citing your source lends credibility to your statements and gives the reader a place from which to do further research.
When you state assumptions, label them as such to let the reader know that, while you believe these statements to be true, they are not facts. The assumption about increased butter usage in the previous example ("We believe the recent campaign by the American Butter Institute has significantly increased the use of butter in baking at the expense of shortening") was signaled by the opening words "We believe."
In addition to labeling your assumptions, whenever possible support them with corroborating evidence. Such corroborating evidence for the butter/shortening example might be, "Nielsen share data show that butter use for baking is up 19 percent since the beginning of their marketing campaign, while shortening for baking use is off 11 percent in the same time period." While this fact doesn't prove your assumption that the campaign has increased butter usage at the expense of shortening, it certainly provides strong circumstantial evidence to support your belief.
To ensure that your background contains enough information, you may include more information than is needed. Too much information makes inefficient use of the reader's time, and can be confusing if the reader is expecting all the information in the background to be relevant to the rest of the document.
There are a number of categories of information that should not be included in the background:
Unsupported or controversial assumptions. The background should be the foundation for the rest of the document, a section that all relevant parties agree on. If you include assumptions in this section that many of the document's readers may legitimately disagree with, you undermine the rest of the arguments in the document. In the background, statements should be self-evident or easily supported. The place for arguments in favor of a controversial point of view is in the main body of a document devoted to that subject, not the background of a document on a different subject.
Extraneous information. Information that may be true but does not have any impact on the subject of the document should not be included anywhere, including the background.
For example, you may have recently tested a new package made of lightweight plastic that is a 10 percent cost-savings compared to the current package. You believe the company should immediately switch to the new package, in order to save money. However, that cost-savings effort is not relevant to the subject of the memo—increasing shortening usage—and thus should not be mentioned in the current document.
Information that is not general knowledge or has not been previously reported. If you have recently acquired information that provides important perspective relative to the main subject of your document, that information should be either reported in a separate summary specifically on the subject, or potentially, included in the main body of the document at hand. The general rule here: If the information you're reporting will be "news" to your readers, it probably does not belong in the background.
For example, suppose you discovered this morning in reading the just-released bimonthly sales report that your sales are declining more rapidly in the Western Division than in the Eastern Division. You believe there may be several reasons for this phenomenon, some of which could be related to the overall category decline, and some of which are probably not. However, the plan you're recommending in the memo at hand is a nationwide plan, and does not attempt to address differences among regions. While the difference in sales results between the Eastern and Western Divisions is an important subject, it needs to be addressed in a separate memo exploring the issue and possible causes. If you mention it for the first time in the background of the memo you're writing now, your reader will appropriately want to know much more about the issue—how severe is the difference, what are the key causes, how long has the difference been going on, and so forth. All of these questions will detract from your reader's attention to the document at hand, which concerns the nationwide plan.
Caution
Too much information in the background is just as problematic as too little. Your reader may not sift through the unimportant data you've presented in order to find what is important.
The material to include in a background section is very dependent on the subject of the document, and the key issues that have the most impact on the subject. You must evaluate the need to ensure that your reader is informed on all important aspects of the subject, balanced by the need to keep your document concise and focused.
The background lays the foundation, or "sets the stage," for the rest of the document.
The background should include enough information so that readers previously unfamiliar with the situation can become knowledgeable enough to make informed judgments on the topic.
The background should exclude extraneous information, unsupported assumptions, and "news"—previously unreported or unknown information.