Understanding your audience

Readers for cause-and-effect analyses and explanations are diverse, but you might notice a difference between audiences you create yourself by drawing attention to a neglected subject and readers who come to your work because your topic already interests them.

Create an audience. In some situations, you must convince readers to pay attention to the phenomenon you intend to explore. (develop a statement) Assume they are smart enough to care about subjects that might affect their lives. But make the case for your subject aggressively. That’s exactly what the editors of the Wall Street Journal do in an editorial noting the steady decrease in traffic deaths that followed a congressional decision ten years earlier to do away with a national 55-mph speed limit.

This may seem noncontroversial now, but at the time the debate was shrill and filled with predictions of doom. Ralph Nader claimed that “history will never forgive Congress for this assault on the sanctity of human life.” Judith Stone, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, predicted to Katie Couric on NBC’s Today Show that there would be “6,400 added highway fatalities a year and millions of more injuries.” Federico Peña, the Clinton administration’s secretary of transportation, declared: “Allowing speed limits to rise above 55 simply means that more Americans will die and be injured on our highways.”

—“Safe at Any Speed,” July 7, 2006

Anticipates readers who might ask, “Why does this issue matter?”

Write to an existing audience. In most cases, you’ll enter cause-and-effect debates already in progress. Whether you intend to uphold what most people already believe or, more controversially, ask them to rethink their positions, you’ll probably face readers as knowledgeable (and opinionated) as you are. In the following opening paragraphs, for example, from an article exploring the decline of fine art in America, notice how cultural critic Camille Paglia presumes an intelligent audience already engaged by her topic but possibly offended by her title: “How Capitalism Can Save Art.”

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music, and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly forty years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Paglia wants readers who care about art to consider what the future holds.

Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in architecture, a frankly commercial field. Outstanding examples are Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV headquarters in Beijing, and Zaha Hadid’s London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Points out that architecture is now more inventive than painting.

What has sapped artistic creativity and innovation in the arts? Two major causes can be identified, one relating to an expansion of form and the other to a contraction of ideology.

Poses causal questions knowledgeable readers will appreciate.

Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. Permanence faded as a goal of art-making.

Diagnoses the artistic problem: political orthodoxy.

But there is a larger question: What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber. The art world, like humanities faculties, suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy — an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s. (I am speaking as a libertarian Democrat who voted for Barack Obama in 2008.)

— “How Capitalism Can Save Art,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2012

Paglia asserts her credentials.