Writing for an audience

Quite frequently, authors experience mixed success after their works are published, often due to missing the mark in regards to their audience. This piece addresses some of the common pitfalls and raises some of the key questions involved in approaching directed writing works.

When writing to an audience, the goal is to make sure that they are able to learn or gain something from your work. Especially when you are hoping to be paid for your work, it’s important to make sure your work had the value you’re looking for. This goal is easily achieved by asking yourself and answering a couple of key questions.

Who am I writing for?

Primarily, it helps to know your audience. Are you trying to reach across the aisle in a political discussion? Perhaps you’re explaining a concept to a children’s class? Maybe you’re giving a big speech at a company dinner to a room full of equally successful entrepreneurs? In each of these cases, your language and tone would be different, and will be better received if you address your audience directly.

Appreciate your audience’s ability to understand your work. An academic paper, for example, must necessarily be more formal than a motivational speech for the kids in your local youth soccer league. Longer, more dramatic sentences can help create a framework for building tension in a drawn-out tale of an age-old conflict. Short phrases drive a point home.

Putting yourself in the right frame of mind to approach your chosen audience is helpful both during and post-production. Take yourself out of your own head, and imagine for a moment that you are on the other side of the readership process. Critique your policies as your counterpart would; see if your instructions would confuse a child’s mind; or see if your speech is really as inspiring, thankful, or honest as you really mean it to be. Then, once you’ve read your work from that perspective, you may have an easier time finding the places where a rewrite is needed.

Why am I writing?

Understand your purpose as soon as you put pen (or pixel) to paper. In order to approach your topic effectively, remember that rhetoric and prose are tools to an end, not an end in and of themselves. If your goal is to educate, keep in mind that your audience doesn’t necessarily understand everything you’re talking about, and it may even be necessary to include a chunk of background information for context and tone. If you are interested in amusing your audience, it’s much more likely that you’ll want to begin with the action, or in medias res, in order to hook your reader and get them not to want to put your work down for a moment, and worry about filling in all the contextual details as they become necessary to make the story as a whole make sense.

Sometimes, when you are working on a completely blank slate, you may not immediately understand your purpose, and just want to write out some ideas that you might flesh out later. This is perfectly okay, but don’t get stuck in the weeds. If your brain is clamoring to put more things onto the paper, get them out in the open so you don’t forget. Then, look to tie some of them together into something more cohesive.

How did I do?

After you’re finished writing, look back at what you’ve written to see if it accomplishes what you set out to do. Proofreading is about more than just catching random grammatical and spelling errors; you also want to create a feeling of confidence for yourself in your work. Setting out to write is, in a sense, setting a goal for yourself, and holding yourself accountable to that goal will help you achieve it, even if it ends up requiring multiple attempts.

At this point, you can consider handing off your work to a helpful reader who will proofread and edit. Giving them ideas about areas where you’re looking for specific types of critique, like the effectiveness of your instructions, or a dramatic scene you aren’t quite sure comes off as less than hyperbolic, can help you glean useful information. They may also prefer working with a clean slate, so let them to it. In either case, accept their feedback and understand that even if it’s dour or devastating, it has the power to help you improve, and using it well will only make you a better writer.

When you are more comfortable asking yourself questions, you will be able to ask questions with more complex or specific answers. Focus on improving your weak points as you grow and emphasize your strengths as you publish. Never lose sight of your overall goals, and continue to persevere.