Most of the time, you will know who the primary audience is—you will be writing a document aimed at a particular group of people or a single person. You may have a client you are writing for or a group you specifically want to understand your ideas.
As a writer, you should anticipate the needs or expectations of your audience in order to convey information or argue for a particular claim. Your audience might be your instructor, classmates, the president of an organization, the staff of a management company, or any other number of possibilities.
Another professor might want you to do library or field research about a social problem and never refer to your own experiences or attitudes toward that problem. Teachers will often try to give students more experience with writing to different audiences by targeting particular readers for a given paper.
That’s an example of what can go awry when you think of your instructor as your only audience. Thinking about your audience differently can improve your writing, especially in terms of how clearly you express your argument. The clearer your points are, the more likely you are to have a strong essay.
Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your argument.
These techniques can help you read your paper in the same way your reader will and make revisions that help your reader understand your argument.
If you write the paper the night before it’s due, you make it almost impossible to read the paper with a fresh eye. Try outlining after writing—after you have a draft, look at each paragraph separately. Write down the main point for each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, in the order you have put them.
Yes, your instructor or TA is probably the actual audience for your paper. Your instructors read and grade your essays, and you want to keep their needs and perspectives in mind when you write. However, when you write an essay with only your instructor in mind, you might not say as much as you should or say it as clearly as you should, because you assume that the person grading it knows more than you do and will fill in the gaps. This leaves it up to the instructor to decide what you are really saying, and she might decide differently than you expect. For example, she might decide that those gaps show that you don’t know and understand the material. Remember that time when you said to yourself, “I don’t have to explain communism; my instructor knows more about that than I do” and got back a paper that said something like “Shows no understanding of communism”? That’s an example of what can go awry when you think of your instructor as your only audience.
Most assignments in college focus on argument rather than the repetition of learned information, so your reader probably doesn’t want a lengthy, detailed, point-by-point summary of your reading (book reports in some classes and argument reconstructions in philosophy classes are big exceptions to this rule).
An audience is the group of people who will be attracted to your writing. They may share certain subject interests, social or political beliefs, or certain demographic features. Once you know something about your target audience, you have some idea about their expectations of the subject, format, and style of writing.
Writers need to consider both audience and purpose in writing because the two elements affect writing significantly, and decisions about one affect the other. For instance, a main purpose in advertising is to sell a product. Advertisers seek the audience who is most likely to purchase a product.
Michel Muraski, Journalism and Technical Communication Department#N#Three categories of audience are the "lay" audience, the "managerial" audience, and the "experts."#N #The "lay" audience has no special or expert knowledge. They connect with the human interest aspect of articles. They usually need background information; they expect more definition and description; and they may want attractive graphics or visuals.#N#The "managerial audience may or may not have more knowledge than the lay audience about the subject, but they need knowledge so they can make a decision about the issue. Any background information, facts, or statistics needed to make a decision should be highlighted.#N#The "experts" may be the most demanding audience in terms of knowledge, presentation, and graphics or visuals. Experts are often "theorists" or "practitioners." For the "expert" audience, document formats are often elaborate and technical, style and vocabulary may be specialized or technical, source citations are reliable and up-to-date, and documentation is accurate.
Any background information, facts, or statistics needed to make a decision should be highlighted. The "experts" may be the most demanding audience in terms of knowledge, presentation, and graphics or visuals. Experts are often "theorists" or "practitioners.".
Don Zimmerman, Journalism and Technical Communication Department#N#One way to analyze an audience is what I call "informal" in its analysis techniques. The other way is a more "formal," structured approach that is not used a lot.#N#With the informal way, a whole series of things usually happens. As a professional works in the field, they grow an intuitive sense about what their target audiences are. In other words, it's like an engineer. They go to a conference, they read the journals, they start to know how to write for people or how to communicate about them or how to target that, without really doing it. In other words, it's life experiences with particular people that will give them that.#N#Other ways are by essentially reading and going through the publications they read. In other words, trade magazines. Some civil engineering news magazines are targeted for the practitioner in civil engineering. Those will give you a pretty good insight as to what's going on. A series of specialized civil engineering magazines deal with different aspects like earth moving news. There's a whole series of publications from the Institute of Concrete Development. Each of those are slightly different in what they want. Some of them are strong research journals and others are targeted to the day-to-day person who's operating in the field.#N#Writers can talk to other people in a company and say, "I'm doing this report for John Smith or Sally." How do they see the world on this? Especially a new person. Most organizations do pretty heavy copy edit in lots of cases. Part of it is, there's a corporate culture often about how you do things and how you say things that may or may not be articulated very well to a new person.#N#The more "formal" analysis techniques I like are things like writing focus groups and group techniques and surveys. One of the questions becomes, "What kinds of information do you need about the audience?" For me, in some ways, it's pretty simple. That is, "What is the primary purpose of this information?" "Is this information to inform them?" "Will that target audience be making a decision on that information?"
Kate Kiefer, English Department#N#For most academic papers, the teacher is the explicit audience. But even within the same discipline, professors might expect quite different formats for papers. For example, in sociology, one prof might ask you to write mainly about your own experiences and your reactions to your experience. Another professor might want you to do library or field research about a social problem and never refer to your own experiences or attitudes toward that problem.#N#Teachers will often try to give students more experience with writing to different audiences by targeting particular readers for a given paper. Then students address the target audience (class members, members of a business community, congressional representatives, and so on), including the teacher as a secondary audience.
As a writer, you should anticipate the needs or expectations of your audience in order to convey information or argue for a particular claim. Your audience might be your instructor, classmates, the president of an organization, the staff of a management company, or any other number of possibilities.
The type of audience identified will shape your document’s format, terminology, style, and technical level. There are several types of audiences, including experts, technicians, executives, gatekeepers, and non-specialists (laypeople). However, most documents you create will have multiple audiences: often, a primary audience —the main audience ...
Often, it is best to think of these in terms of the primary audience (s) and secondary audience (s). The primary audience is the main reader of the document. For example, if you create a set of safety protocols to be displayed in a laboratory, the primary audience will be the technicians which use the laboratory.
The rest of the chapter gives strategies to revise a document’s content for your audience, including changes to the content, style and format, sentence style, and document design.
In an argumentative paragraph, you will make a claim which you will prove through the rest of the paragraph (e.g., reports; proposals; some emails, letters, and memos).
Therefore, writing a strong introduction to the entire document—one that makes clear the topic, purpose, audience, and contents of that document—makes the document easier to understand.
During the planning stages of your document, you should analyze the audience to identify the type (or types—it is rarely just one type) of readers. Identifying what type of reader may be interested in your document will help you create an improved, more effective document.
Typically, sans-serif fonts, such as Ariel, are useful for online readers. Serif fonts, such as Time New Roman, are useful for print texts.