Shaping Your Topic for Your Purpose and Your Audience
See critical questions about audience and more about purpose. See more about both.
As you work on your college papers, you may feel as if you’re juggling — selecting weighty points and lively details, tossing them into the air, keeping them all moving in sequence. Busy as you are juggling, however, your performance almost always draws a crowd — your instructor, classmates, or other readers. They’ll expect your attention, too, as you try to achieve your purpose — probably informing, explaining, or persuading.
Think carefully about your audience and purpose as you plan. If you want to show your classmates and instructor the importance of an event, start by deciding how much detail they need. If most of them have gotten speeding tickets, they’ll need less information about that event than city commuters might. However, to achieve your purpose, you’ll need to go beyond what happened to why the event mattered to you. No matter how many tickets your readers have gotten, they won’t know what that experience means to you unless you share that information. They may incorrectly assume that you worried about being late to class or having to pay higher insurance rates. In fact, you had suddenly realized your narrow escape from an accident like your cousin’s, a recognition that motivated you to change.
Similarly, if you want to persuade county officials to change the way absentee ballots are distributed to college students, you’ll need to support your idea with reasons and evidence — drawing on state election laws and legal precedents familiar to these readers as well as experiences of student voters. You may need to show how your proposal would solve existing problems and also why it would do so better than other proposals.
Plan for your purpose and audience using questions such as these:
- What is your general purpose? What do you want to accomplish? Do you want readers to smile, think, or agree? To learn, accept, respect, care, change, or reply? How might your writing accomplish your aims?
- Who are your readers? If they are not clearly identified by your assignment or situation, what do you assume about them? What do they know or want to know? What opinions do they hold? What do they find informative or persuasive? How might you appeal to them?
- How might you narrow and focus your ideas about the topic, given what you know or assume about your purpose and audience? Which slant would best achieve your purpose? What points would appeal most strongly to your readers? What details would engage or persuade them?
- What qualities of good writing have been discussed in your class, explained in your syllabus, or identified in readings? What criteria have emerged from exchanges of drafts with classmates or comments from your instructor? How might you demonstrate these qualities to readers?