One of the characteristic traits of an effective writer is the ability to write for a variety of audiences, using language, style, and evidence appropriate to particular readers. The key word here is appropriate: just as you would be unlikely to sprinkle jokes through a PTA presentation on child abuse, neither would you post a detailed and academic argument in response to a blog filled with funny cat pictures. Such behavior would be wildly inappropriate given the nature of your audience.
Thinking systematically about your audience can help you make decisions about a writing assignment. For example, it can help you decide what sort of organizational plan to follow, what information to include or exclude, and even what specific words to use. If you are writing an article for a journal for nurses about a drug that prevents patients from developing infections from intravenous feeding tubes, you will not need to give much information about how such tubes work or to define many terms. But if you are writing about the same topic in a pamphlet for patients, you will have to give a great deal of background information and define (or avoid) technical terms.
What person or group do you most want to reach? Is this audience already sympathetic to your views?
How much do you know about your audience? In what ways may its members differ from you? from one another? Consider education, geographic region, age, gender, occupation, social class, ethnic and cultural heritage, politics, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, disabilities, and so on.
What assumptions can you make about your audience members? What might they value—
What do members of the audience already know about your topic? Do you need to provide background information or define terms?
What kind of information and evidence will the audience find most compelling—
What stance do your audience members have toward your topic? What are they likely to know about it? What views might they already hold?
What is your relationship to the audience?
What is your attitude toward the audience?
For some informal writing—
In a famous cartoon by Peter Steiner, one dog tells another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” However, as online privacy becomes less common—
Even if you write with intuitive ease in tweets and texts to friends, you may struggle when asked to write for an instructor or for a general audience. You may wonder, for example, why you need to define terms in your writing that your instructor has used in class, or what you can assume a general audience knows about your topic. When you are new to academic writing, making such assumptions can be tricky. If you can identify samples of writing that appeal to an audience similar to the one you are writing for, look for clues about what level of knowledge you can assume; if still in doubt, check with your instructor.
Members of your class will also usually be part of your audience, especially if you are responding to one another’s drafts in peer review. You may also have a chance to identify an audience for your assignment—
Pay careful attention to the ways in which your writing can either invite readers to be part of the audience or leave them out. Look at the following sentence: As every schoolchild knows, the world is losing its rain forests at the rate of one acre per second. The writer here gives a clear message about who is—
You can help make readers feel they are part of your audience. Be especially careful with the pronouns you use, the assumptions you make, and the kinds of support you offer for your ideas.
Use appropriate pronouns. The pronouns you use can include or exclude readers. When bell hooks says “The most powerful resource any of us can have as we study and teach in university settings is full understanding and appreciation of the richness, beauty, and primacy of our familial and community backgrounds,” she uses “us” and “we” to connect with her audience—
Avoid unfounded assumptions. Be careful what you assume about your readers and their views, and avoid language that may unintentionally exclude readers. Use words like naturally and of course carefully, for what seems natural to you—
Offer appropriate evidence. The evidence you use to support your arguments can help draw in your readers. A student writing about services for people with disabilities might ask readers who have no personal experience with the topic to imagine themselves in a wheelchair, trying to enter a building with steps but no ramp. Inviting them to be part of her audience would help them accept her ideas. On the other hand, inappropriate evidence can leave readers out. Complex statistical evidence might well appeal to public-
In addition to her instructor, Emily Lesk’s audience for her first-
Find out more about how Emily Lesk analyzed the assignment and purposes for her writing project.