Determining Your Audience

A skill all writers need to develop is the ability to adapt the content of your writing depending on the audience you have in mind. This can be difficult especially if you are used to conversation where you have the audience in front of you and know immediately by audience reaction whether or not your statements have made sense. In writing there is no immediate response so you must imagine the readers accurately and include enough information to allow them to follow the ideas.

If you include too little information, your readers will not be able to follow your ideas; too much information and the readers may become bored. For example, when describing a local festival, you need to know your audience in order to determine how much detail to include in your description. If the audience is familiar with the festival, you may wish to describe incidents which made that particular festival a memorable one. See for example, my description of an incident at Tanabata, a short narrative which was written for an audience familiar with Japan.

Furthermore, you need to be aware of the difference your relationship to the audience makes in your style of writing. Think of the difference between a business letter you write to someone unknown and a personal letter to a friend or relative.

1. Identify the audience -- Is it parents, teachers, fellow students, a younger relative, a potential employer, a newspaper editor?

2. What do I know about them?

• What experiences have they had?
• What is their age, sex, income, area of residence, occupation, ethnic ties, marital status?
• Have they travelled?
• Are they educated?
• Will they have discussed the issue, read about it, or seen what is being described?
• What values do they hold (home, family, job success, religious, monetary, social acceptance, political, ethical)?
• Are they traditional or modern?
• What prejudices do they hold?

3. Why am I writing? To:

• entertain?
• inform?
• convince?
• express myself?

4. My audience and the subject I am writing about.

• What do they know about the subject?
• What opinions are they likely to hold about this subject?
• How strong are their opinions?
• How are they likely to react to what I write (agree, disagree, or be indifferent)?

5. What is my relationship to the audience?

• What does the audience know about me?
• What experiences, attitudes, interests, values, prejudices do my audience and I share?
• Is this subject appropriate for this audience?

6. Based on this analysis, what role do I wish to take in relation to my audience (peer, authority, subordinate [e.g., an employee], a writer, etc.)?

• What voice do I wish to use (familiar, distant)?
• What pattern/mode/development is appropriate?
• How simple/complex vocabulary and syntax should I use?
• How can I best achieve the goals I have in writing?

Adapted from Lauer, Montague, Lunsford, & Emig, 1981, pp. 47-48, Hughey et al. 1983, pp. 96-97, and Pfister & Petrick, 1980, p. 214