Analyzing audiences

Contents:

Imagining audiences for formal and academic writing

Appealing to your whole audience

Every writer can benefit from thinking carefully about who the audience is, what the audience already knows or thinks, and what the audience needs and expects to find out. 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.

Imagining audiences for formal and academic writing

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—perhaps a business proposal addressed to a hypothetical manager or a Web presentation posted for an online audience that is potentially global. In each case, it pays to consider carefully how your audience(s) may respond to the words, images, and other elements you choose.

Appealing to your whole audience

All writers need to pay very careful attention to the ways in which their 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—and who is not—part of the audience: if you don’t know this fact or suspect it may not be true, you are not invited to participate and, as a result, may feel insulted.

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.