11 Know Your Audience

As we’ve covered in the previous couple of chapters, you already know some of the ways in which different audiences impact the ways in which you write/communicate. You also already act on that knowledge, changing things like vocabulary, tone, and style to better match up with the needs, preferences, and expectations of your audience.

To best reach your audience, there are some specific things you need to think about as you make those choices about how to best communicate your message.

Our world grows more and more interconnected every day. It’s now entirely possible for someone sitting in an apartment in Bismarck, North Dakota to spend their workday writing professional and technical documents that will be read exclusively by someone working in an office in Kyoto, Japan. It’s absolutely necessary for twenty-first century writers – which is anyone with a job – to think about the ways their audience impacts their writing choices.

To give you a better idea of what that entails, let’s work our way through some of those things to consider, using a professor – like, you know, me – and the audiences he has to deal with every day.

Who are they?

For the sake of the example, let’s stick to just the audiences a professor would deal with at work.

At first, that looks pretty simple, right? Just three audiences. I shouldn’t have to make very many adjustments over the course of a day.

But look at that list a little more closely. The first group on it is students. Are all of the students at the college the same? Are all of the students who are in all of my classes the same? Or even all of the students in one particular class?

Spoiler alert – the answer to all of those is no.

That means I have a lot more than three audiences to deal with on a given day and I need to adjust to each one. That is a lot of code switching. And that’s not even considering all of the different other professors I have to talk to during the course of the day.

Let’s keep it simple and just focus on one class. For example, the students in one particular section of ENG 103. That answers the who are they, right?

(Would I be asking if it did?)

Think about the students in any one of your classes and consider how different they are. There are certain to be some traditional age students here fresh out of high school. There’s probably a non-traditional age student or two, someone a little bit older than the rest. It’s pretty likely that there are some students from really well-off high schools and some from very poverty stricken schools or some who didn’t even go to high school in America. Statistically speaking, there are bound to be some white students, some students of color, some straight, some not straight, some who have spoken English their entire lives, and some who have only been speaking it for a year (or less.)

That’s more than just one audience. Sometimes, it’s more than a dozen.

Let’s skip ahead to one of the other items on that list:

What do they know?

When you’re writing to an audience, this question is often better phrased as “what do they know about my topic”. That’s important because it has a direct impact on what information you do and don’t give them on whatever topic you’re writing about.

But let’s think about it in a different way. Think about the example of the students in my one ENG 103 section. “What do they know” could apply to a lot of things. Like, for example: pop culture references.

Whenever I take attendance on the first day of a face-to-face class, there’s always someone absent and when I call their name and get no response, I will often say “Bueller? Bueller?” When I first started teaching, everyone got that joke. Now, maybe one or two students a semester get it, so I end up showing this clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to explain it:

That example leads to another example of what students know or might not know. In the last sentence of the paragraph before the video clip, I included the name of the move – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – and it’s underlined and in a different color than the rest of the text. A lot of students know that’s a signal that the text is a link, in this case to the movie’s Wikipedia page, and they can click on it to get more information about the topic. But not all students understand that and not everyone in your potential audiences might either.

That’s one reason I included the actual clip and not just a link to it: by presenting information in multiple ways, I can be sure that I’m reaching as much of my audience as possible.

We’ll be spending a lot of time in this course working on understanding audience and figuring out how to make the most effective choices for how to reach them. Keep that list in mind whenever you need to choose an audience for your writing in this class.