Imagine that you get into a minor car accident and have to go to the hospital due to a couple some scrapes and bruises. It's not very serious, but you know your parents will worry about you, so you tell them a mild version of what happened, leaving out some details. Would you tell this same version to your friends? Would you be more or less specific? Consider if you had to tell your insurance company what happened. What parts of the accident would you emphasize?
In our everyday lives, we cater to different audiences all the time. It's second nature to change to tell a story in different ways. Understanding your audience is key for proper communication.
Fig. 1 - You can address many audiences.
The Importance Of Knowing Your Audience In Writing
Every piece of writing has an audience. Take, for example, picture books. Picture books have the primary audience of young children. This means the writing style in picture books has simpler vocabulary, sentence structures, and main ideas. Now, compare the writing inside a picture book with a history textbook. In a history textbook, the writing is often dense with many complex ideas, and the vocabulary might include words that are unfamiliar. Each of these two writings is a type of book, but they serve a different purpose and are written to a distinct audience. Acknowledging and knowing a paper's audience can help structure the writing so that the main point of the paper, email, or story is most easily understood.
Your audience is the group who may read your writing.
Writers have many different ways of talking and writing, whether informal or formal, detailed and specific, or general. When speaking, it's easy to convey feelings about something, whether it's through facial and body expressions or intonation.
Diction is used to convey the author's points and feelings when writing. Writing with a specific audience in mind helps to simplify decisions as a piece is written, and contributes to the essay's purpose.
Real vs. Intended Audience
When discussing the audience of a paper, there are two groups that you must consider. The first is the real audience, and the second is the intended audience. Let's break down each of these individually.
Your real audience is those who actually read your writing.
This could include your parents, classmates, teachers, friends, or a test examiner. Considering the real audience of a paper helps keep the paper in perspective. For example, imagine writing an essay on The Great Gatsby. Because a teacher — who has already read the book — is the one reading the essay, it would be unnecessary to summarize the entire plot. The student could simply pick and choose different examples in The Great Gatsby that back up their thesis statement.
This is especially important to remember when writing a rhetorical essay because keeping the intended audience in mind helps to unify your paper in both style and purpose. Consider a very simple example of this. Imagine if you were writing an essay about cats being better than dogs. Who might be interested in reading your paper? In this case, the intended audience would most likely be individuals who like cats, individuals who like dogs, or individuals who like both.
Consider a prompt that asks students to write about whether they believe perfection is attainable or not and why. Who would be the audience? Is it the teacher, the student's peers, or parents that expect too much of their children? Choosing any one of these target groups could completely change the essay. If you chose parents, then perhaps your essay would be more formal with examples that parents could relate to — like the stress of school on teens' sleep schedule and mental health.
When you write to a specific audience, the reader will likely agree with your argument. The main idea is that when you choose an audience, make sure you write to that audience for most of your paper.
Sometimes the real and intended audiences are the same, but not always!
How To Understand Your Audience In Writing
Imagine you're riding a bike. You know how a bike works. Your feet turn the pedals which makes the wheels turn, while your arms steer using the handlebars, and your hands control the brakes. Knowing how a bike works makes it easier to ride a bike. Similarly, knowing how to identify real and intended audiences makes it easier to write to a specific audience.
Determining the Audience of a Paper
Ask yourself the following questions when you want to determine the audience of a paper.
- What is this paper about?
- What kind of people would this paper typically attract?
Examine the titles listed below and use each example to identify an audience. Remember to consider the two questions above!
1. Book Banning in US School Libraries: What students are saying.
What does this article seem to be about? Based on the title, this article is about new book bans in school libraries across the country, and how students feel about it.
Who would this article attract? It would most likely attract students and teens who are interested in books, as well as their parents.
2. Poland recalls a soccer player from World Cup due to injury.
What does this article seem to be about? Based on the title, this article is about a Polish soccer player who got injured. As a result, he is not playing in a World Cup qualifying game with Poland's national soccer team.
Who would this article attract? Most likely, this article would attract soccer fans — specifically those who are Polish — or fans of this specific soccer player.
3. Giant Pandas attract thousands of guests to their National Zoo home.
What does this article appear to be about? Based on the title, this article seems to be about the Giant Pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, and how they've received a lot of attention.
Who would this article attract? This article would most likely attract animal lovers, those who live in the Washington, DC area, and people who enjoy zoos and might have visited the National Zoo before.
Though simple, looking at newspaper titles and attempting to identify the article's audience can be a helpful exercise that can help you when looking at essay prompts. Consider the below prompt:
In a well-written essay, develop your position on the value or function of polite speech in a culture or community with which you are familiar. Use appropriate evidence from your reading, experience, or observations to support your argument.
After looking at all of these examples, identifying the audience of a paper will hopefully be a quick and easy endeavor in the future!
The Best Questions To Understand Your Target Audience
When choosing an audience for your own writing, there are several questions to ask yourself. Exploring these components can make finding a target audience and writing an essay much easier!
Fig. 2 - Think about how to address your audience.
Who Should This Reach?
Remember the difference between a real audience and an intended audience when writing your paper. Who do you want to read your paper? Who do you think will read your paper? Your audience can be very specific, general, or anywhere between. The more specific your audience is, typically the smaller it will be, while conversely, the more general your audience is, the bigger it will be. In most situations, you may be writing for school. Examine the simple example below, and identify the real and intended audience.
You're writing a paper on Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
Your intended audience would be your classmates and other individuals who have read Brave New World, or those who are interested in fictional dystopian societies.
Your real audience would be your teacher or professor, who will most likely be the ones to read your finished paper.
Now that you've identified your target audiences, you can begin to ask the following questions:
- What is the relationship between you (the writer) and your readers?
- How much does the reader already know about your topic?
Considering these two questions makes it easier to structure your paper. In this case, it is most likely better to write to your real audience than your intended audience, as you can assume that your teacher knows the plotline of Brave New World. Because your teacher already knows the book's events, you can skip the summary and focus on important arguments that support your thesis. Additionally, now that you know your real and intended audience, you can use specific language that your audience can understand, like literary analysis terms in your paper such as metaphor or irony. Identifying your audience has helped you structure your paper.
Sometimes it's helpful to make a list of what your audience already knows and what your audience doesn't know. That way, you know what to include in your paper. It's always better to assume your audience knows less than you, which ultimately makes your paper more detailed and specific!
What Will Interest Your Readers?
Identifying what about your topic interests readers most can help you outline your paper and stay on track. Continuing using Brave New World as an example, some major themes of the novel are:
- Technology Use to Control Society
- Incompatibility of Happiness versus Truth
- Individuality
- Agency
Given that these are major themes of the novel, this is most likely what your readers would be interested in reading about in your paper. Now that you know what interests your readers, you can insert these factors into your writing in a dynamic way to attract your target audience.
Who Would Agree or Disagree with You?
Consider again this simple example — a paper about why cats are better than dogs. Chances are, within the audience for this paper, there will be people who strongly agree that cats are better than dogs, people who strongly disagree that cats are better than dogs, and some individuals who aren't sure.
Fig. 3 - Consider who would agree and disagree.
Understanding the dichotomy in this argument makes it easier to write in a way that appeals to your target audience. As mentioned before, the target audience for this paper would most likely be animal lovers, particularly those that enjoy cats and dogs. Consider that the audience is mostly cat lovers. This means the paper would emphasize and reinforce why their point of view is correct. However, what if the main audience was dog lovers? In this case, the paper would most likely focus on changing your audience's perspective through carefully crafted arguments.
Examine how you might apply this same concept to Brave New World. First, you can assume that the target audience for an essay like this would be people who have read Brave New World and enjoy books. Now, consider the below statement:
World State members have more freedom because they take soma and feel completely happy, even though they're conditioned. Write a paper explaining why you agree or disagree with this statement and support your argument with textual evidence.
Perhaps individuals who believe that happiness is the most important thing in life would agree with this statement. If true, it would be best to focus one's arguments on why happiness is important and how happiness (and the use of soma) protects the World State members from harsh realities. The paper's goal would then be to reaffirm the audience's thinking.
Conversely, what if the audience were individuals who thought that World State members have less freedom because they take soma and do not have the same agency as John? In this case, the arguments presented would need to work to change the audience's minds. This might be a good place to insert counterarguments, for example:
While John has a unique identity in Brave New World, his inability to handle "freedom" and his destructive tendencies trap him and ultimately lead to his death.
In the above example, the sentence consists of two thoughts: agreement followed by disagreement. When convincing an audience that your thesis is correct, presenting counterarguments can be a great tool.
Adding counterarguments to an essay can help emphasize why the paper's thesis is correct! Take the cat are better than dogs example. In this case, acknowledging why dogs are good pets but then circling back to why cats still outweigh dogs can benefit the overall thesis!
Understanding Your Audience - Key Takeaways
- Acknowledging and knowing your audience can help you structure your writing so that the paper's main point, email, or story is most easily understood.
- When you want to determine the audience of a specific paper, think about your topic and audience.
- The real audience is anyone who actually reads your writing.
- The intended audience is who you are trying to influence with your writing.
- Consider what you believe and don't believe when trying to reach an audience.
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