Analyse Your Audience
Estimated Time: 1 hour
🗣 "Most people are so engrossed in the message they are trying to convey that they forget to step out of themselves and think about the reader. The most effective communicators try to visualise the person reading and reacting to their writing."
- Mark H McCormack
Guiding question: Who will read my writing, and what implications does this have on achieving my purpose?
📺 Watch the following video on knowing your audience.
Determining your purpose and determining your audience is a chicken and egg situation. What you want to accomplish with your writing can influence who the ideal audience should be. But, at the same time, the audience you select can affect what you want to achieve. Therefore, as you are thinking about the purpose of your writing, also think about the audience.
📺 Watch the following video on the benefits of writing with your audience in mind.
Remember that you can think of communication as a game of catch, where the sender throws a message to the receiver. At the very least, the sender must know who will be receiving their message so that they can aim it at them. Additionally, recall that the sender's responsibility is to ensure that the receiver can catch their message. To do so, the sender must understand the receiver (e.g., their interests, skill level, abilities) to tailor their throw accordingly. Gaining this understanding requires intentionality and consideration before writing and can be accomplished by identifying and analysing your audience.
Identifying Your Target Audience
When identifying your target audience, you can ask the following questions:
- How big is my audience? (e.g., One person, a small group, the entire company, the general public)?
- Are there multiple audiences? If so, who is most important?
- Is there a secondary audience that may read my message and influence the target audience or be impacted by the target audience's actions?
- What do I know about my audience (e.g., age, gender, cultural background, interests, biases, or concerns), and how could these factors impact how they receive my message?
- What is my professional or personal relationship with the audience? And how does this impact the expected formality of my message?
Analysing Your Target Audience
When analysing your target audience, you can ask the following questions. Open the toggles to learn why each question matters:
How much does my audience already know about the topic of my message?
Why this matters: This may affect how much detail you need to include in the message and the semantic or psychological/attitudinal communication barriers that may arise when they read your message.
What terminology or vocabulary does my audience know or not know?
Why this matters: This may affect the terminology that you should or shouldn't use in your writing and the semantic communication barriers that may arise when they read your message.
What points will my audience care about most? And what evidence (e.g., facts, statistics, personal stories, examples) will be most effective in achieving my purpose?
Why this matters: This may affect the information that you should include in your message to achieve your purpose.
What does my audience need to know about the topic of my message to achieve my purpose?
Why this matters: This may impact the critical information you need to include in your message and will help you keep your message clear and concise.
Does my audience already have an opinion on the topic of my message? How does this impact my purpose?
Why this matters: This may affect how open they are to reading your message and the psychological/attitudinal communication barriers that may arise when they read your message.
Does my audience have a stake or interest in the topic of my message? How does this impact my purpose?
Why this matters: This may affect how open they are to reading your message and the psychological/attitudinal communication barriers that may arise when they read your message.
Could my audience have an emotional reaction to my message? How does this impact my desired purpose?
Why this matters: This may affect how open they are to reading your message and the psychological/attitudinal communication barriers that may arise when they read your message.
Discuss: Adjusting to Your Audience
💬 Consider the following situation: You have just been accepted to a Masters program and plan to resign from your job to start the program in three months.
- Write a message to a friend who helped you prepare your application, telling her about your acceptance.
- Write a message to your boss, who sees you as a critical employee, telling her about your acceptance.
Use the above guiding questions as you think through your approach for the different audiences. Then, submit your responses in the Padlet below, along with a reflection on how you adapted your message.
Up until this point, we have been discussing communicating with other people (i.e. human audiences). However, in an increasingly digital world, our writing isn't only read by other humans. Depending on what you are writing, your messages might be read by computer programs that look for different things than human readers. Therefore, we will close this section by exploring how to write for non-human audiences.
📺 Watch the following video on writing for non-human audiences
References
Burnell, C., Wood, J., Babin, M., Pesznecker, S., Rosevear, N. The Word on College Reading and Writing. Open Oregon Educational Resources.
Davis, Kenneth. (2010). The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Business Writing and Communication, Second Edition. McGraw Hill.
eCampus Ontario (2018). Communication for Business Professionals. eCampus Ontario
Gross, A., Hamlin, A., Merck, B., Rubio, C., Naas, J., Savage, M., DeSilva, M. Technical Writing. Open Oregon Educational Resources
Smith, Jordan. Communication @ Work. eCampus Ontario