How to Write for An Audience (Effectively)

If you're struggling to write with a specific audience in mind, you aren't alone.

In middle school and high school, students often assume that their written assignments have one audience: the teacher. In a classroom setting, the teacher’s job is to read their students’ papers; there’s always a guaranteed audience. Students also know that while they might be pretending to write to a specific audience, their true audience is the teacher. The teacher’s preferences often overtake specific genre and audience-informed choices.

Things are different after you graduate.

If you’re writing blogs for a digital marketing agency, for example, your audience is the client’s customers. If you’re writing a submission for a magazine or literary journal, your audience is the magazine or journal’s readers and the editors who have their readers in mind. The same goes for research articles, board game manuals, journalism, or any other kind of writing.

And your audience is not guaranteed, meaning you must pull them in. Not only that, but you need to know who you’re trying to engage with specifically. But how?

Pay Attention To The Voices In Your Head

Whether it’s a teacher, a friend, a relative, or a sworn enemy, there are often people we write to subconsciously, even if they are no longer present in our lives. Writing to this voice isn’t always a bad thing. But does the person you have in mind fit with the audience you wish to attract?

If you’re writing a manual or a tranquil poem, you don’t want to be writing for someone with whom you often argue. If you do, your piece will likely be argumentative. You don’t want that in a manual or a calming poem.

To decide whether a certain voice in your mind is the correct audience, you need to understand what kind of person you want to engage through your writing. To do that, we have to move on to definitions.

Definitions

What kind of people are you writing to? Notice: we aren’t trying to answer the “who” question, not yet; it’ll be easier to answer that question once we find a description.

Fiction writers, for example, can write for different age groups with different preferences for genre, tropes, and themes. Come up with a list of descriptions of the group you’re trying to reach: do they have similar jobs or geographic locations? Look for the things they have in common before delving into their differences. If there were to be a community engaging in a discussion relevant to your topic, what would define that community?

You don’t need to worry about understanding the implications behind these categories just yet, either. Often, your message determines your audience. What ideas are you trying to share, and who are you trying to reach? If you brought your topic or idea up in conversation, who would join the discussion?

You’ll find that writing after you have an intended audience with these descriptions, even if they’re vague, is easier than attempting to write with no audience at all.

Research into Discourse Communities/Genre

You've found a definition for the type of community that:

1. Would be interested in your topic

2. You wish to reach

Now, it will be easier to find that specific community and observe their conversations. You want your writing to be relevant, and you want to make sure you’re adding something valuable to the discussion. Read through posts on forums, news articles, or research articles by the people in your audience. Doing this will give you an idea of what their opinions might be and what objections they might have to your writing.

These communities will have a common goal that impacts the genre, rules, and even the words community members select when engaging in discourse. You’ll want to see how they write, especially if you are an outsider or you are new to the community. If a community has jargon or genre guidelines (style guides are an important example), pay attention to them. Most publishing houses throw out manuscripts that don’t follow submission guidelines or style guides (typically The Chicago Manual of Style), and many academic communities disregard articles that don’t match their ideals of professionalism.

Imagination

If you’ve been struggling so far with the idea of drawing in real audience members, try creating profiles (or, if you’re creatively inclined, characters) to address using the definitions you came up with to describe your audience. Try to come up with multiple people who might see your topic differently, who might differ in what they “get out of” your writing. Figure out what kind of voice you want to use in your writing and determine who would encourage you to use that voice (create an adversary, for example, and you’ll be argumentative).

The more detailed to profile or character, the better. It’ll be easier to understand your audience’s point of view if you make your imaginary audience members personal. If the idea of imagining an audience seems daunting to you, then you’ll want to rely more on the previous tips.

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Don’t be discouraged if this process takes a long time the first few times (or the first few hundred times). Engage in conversations and share you’re writing with people who can help you reach the audience you’re looking for. Practice writing for those audiences, even if it’s difficult at first. You’ll be surprised at the amount of writer’s block you’ll avoid by doing so.