This learning packet should:
-Distinguish between real and intended audience
-Explain the importance of determining the audience before writing the paper
-Connect student understanding of chosen audience with stylistic choices (tone, vocabulary, formality, etc.)
-Indicate or imply their chosen audience in the title or introduction (e.g. A Teacher's Guide to Incorporating Technology in the Classroom)
-Recognize the difference between a specific and general audience (e.g. graduate students in Psychology vs. students)
-Choose specific audiences.
By incorporating video clips, informative slide show presentations, and an interesting and useful article, this learning packet aims to provide lots of information to learners about finding your audience when writing (speeches, essays, etc.). The packet offers definitions of key terms (real vs. intended audiences, etc.), examples, and helpful advice from experts.
This video provides a short, simple introduction to analyzing your audience, which is a key component in any kind of writing (speeches or otherwise). If you enjoy the style of this presenter, view more of her clips for analyzing various audience elements by searching "Public Speaking Tips: Audience Analysis" at www.youtube.com.
This slide show is based on a very helpful article by a college professor which outlines all of the basics of finding your audience in writing. From the importance of audience in writing clarity to the differences between real and intended audiences, this slide show offers a lot of useful information in an easily accessible format. This is a great place to start for any writer considering audience.
Source: See slide show presentation for citation.
Though this clip focuses on oral presentations and speechwriting and knowing your audiences in these formats, all of the advice can be easily applied to writing as well. Particularly useful are the tips about providing information for a more international audience with language challenges.
This informative slide show presentation offers some simple reminders for writers of all levels. The presentation focuses on the fact that the more a writer knows about his/her intended audience, the more focused his/her writing will be, and provides some engaging questions about intended audiences for writers to ask themselves during the writing process.
Source: See slide show presentation for citation.
When you're in the process of writing a paper, it's easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you've thought about it consciously or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for yourself. 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.
To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you're writing a letter to your grandmother to tell her about your first month of college. What details and stories might you include? What might you leave out? Now imagine that you're writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. Unless you have an extremely cool grandma to whom you're very close, it's likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.
Isn't my instructor my audience?
Yes, your instructor 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.
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. Your instructor will say, "He really understands communism—he's able to explain it simply and clearly!" By treating your instructor as an intelligent but uninformed audience, you end up addressing her more effectively.
How do I identify my audience and what they want from me?
Before you even begin the process of writing, take some time to consider who your audience is and what they want from you. Use the following questions to help you identify your audience and what you can do to address their wants and needs.
How much should I explain?
This is the hard part. As we said earlier, you want to show your instructor that you know the material. But different assignments call for varying degrees of information. Different fields also have different expectations. The best place to start figuring out how much you should say about each part of your paper is in a careful reading of the assignment. The assignment may specify an audience for your paper; sometimes the instructor will ask you to imagine that you are writing to your congressperson, for a professional journal, to a group of specialists in a particular field, or for a group of your peers. If the assignment doesn't specify an audience, you may find it most useful to imagine your classmates reading the paper, rather than your instructor.
Now, knowing your imaginary audience, what other clues can you get from the assignment? If the assignment asks you to summarize something that you have read, then your reader wants you to include more examples from the text than if the assignment asks you to interpret the passage. Most assignments 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 are big exceptions to this rule). If your assignment asks you to interpret or analyze the text (or an event or idea), then you want to make sure that your explanation of the material is focused and not so detailed that you end up spending more time on examples than on your analysis.
Once you have a draft, try your level of explanation out on a friend, a classmate, or tutor. Get the person to read your rough draft, and then ask her to talk to you about what she did and didn't understand. (Now is not the time to talk about proofreading stuff, so make sure she ignores those issues for the time being). You will likely get one of the following responses or a combination of them:
Sometimes it's not the amount of explanation that matters, but the word choice and tone you adopt. Your word choice and tone need to match your audience's expectations. For example, imagine you are researching piranhas; you find an article in National Geographic and another one in an academic journal for scientists. How would you expect the two articles to sound? National Geographic is written for a popular audience; you might expect it to have sentences like "The piranha generally lives in shallow rivers and streams in South America." The scientific journal, on the other hand, might use much more technical language, because it's written for an audience of specialists. A sentence like "Serrasalmus piraya lives in fresh and brackish intercoastal and proto-arboreal sub-tropical regions between the 45th and 38th parallels" might not be out of place in the journal.
Generally, you want your reader to know enough material to understand the points you are making. It's like the old forest/trees metaphor. If you give the reader nothing but trees, she won't see the forest (your thesis, the reason for your paper). If you give her a big forest and no trees, she won't know how you got to the forest (she might say, "Your point is fine, but you haven't proven it to me"). You want the reader to say, "Nice forest, and those trees really help me to see it."
Reading your own drafts
Writers tend to read over their own papers pretty quickly, with the knowledge of what they are trying to argue already in their minds. Reading in this way can cause you to skip over gaps in your written argument because the gap-filler is in your head. A problem occurs when your reader falls into these gaps. Your reader wants you to make the necessary connections from one thought or sentence to the next. When you don't, the reader can become confused or frustrated. Think about when you read something and you struggle to find the most important points or what the writer is trying to say. Isn't that annoying? Doesn't it make you want to quit reading and surf the web or call a friend?
Putting yourself in the reader's position
Instead of reading your draft as if you wrote it and know what you meant, try reading it as if you have no previous knowledge of the material. Have you explained enough? Are the connections clear? This can be hard to do at first. Consider using one of the following strategies:
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. Then, when your instructor finally reads your finished draft, he or she won't have to fill in any gaps. The more work you do, the less work your audience will have to do—and the more likely it is that your instructor will follow and understand your argument.
Source: http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/audience.html, modified by Rebecca Oberg