Knowing the audience

Even with the least important message, you should keep in mind who is to read it.

Our tutor recently gave an informal workshop for some students on note-taking.  One of the bits of advice he gave was, “Write as if you were talking to yourself, or rather the you of a couple of months from now.”  It was intended to help students get started who had trouble getting ideas on paper and who weren’t certain where or how to begin.  And it had the advantage of being literally true, at least if the notes were being used as he intended.  But we noticed that it opened up a much more general question for writers: who is your audience?

Few people would describe themselves as writers, yet almost all of us are exercising that skill daily.  Texts and emails are writing.  They are terse and generally informal genres, but still intended as a form of communication.  It is painfully obvious that, to get a point across, one needs some idea of the recipient.  Use of slang and idiom, formal or informal grammar, shared background for references, even the language chosen will depend on who is expected to interpret the message at the other end.  It is also painfully obvious that the lesson is ignored or forgotten routinely, from the “reply all” mistakenly clicked to the convoluted technical paragraph that actually means nothing.

But the question is particularly hard to answer with some newer forms of writing, widening that term to include blogs, videos and podcasts.  These are sent out over the internet to whomever decides to pick them up; those may form quite a different population from that in the writer’s mind originally.  And the feedback necessary to make adjustments is sparse and biased.  As a rule, only those with the most positive or negative impressions will be motivated to comment, and the latter will be more inclined simply to go elsewhere.

So the writer is strongly tempted (if the issue arises consciously at all) to fall back on talking to his- or herself.  Indeed, we strongly suspect that the vast majority of social media posts are solely self-expression rather than any real attempt at communication.  There is, of course, nothing wrong with that, as long as it’s recognized as such.

But simple self-expression is not the aim of this blog and we need to keep in mind the basic question.  For one, we are very aware that all of our consultants are unusual in many ways, and so are not necessarily good measures of our readership.  For another, it has recently come to our attention that our audience is more extensive and diverse than we thought.  We need to be more thoughtful and careful because someone is watching.