How to Write at the Level of Your Audience
“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.” — John Steinbeck
Write at the level of your audience.
Here are some examples.
EXAMPLE 1
If you are writing a manual for electrical engineers, you do not need to explain what Ohm’s Law is. Actually, if you do, you may insult and alienate your highly educated readers.
If, however, you are writing a children’s book or a general-purpose newspaper article, you have to make sure to define the “Ohm’s Law.”
EXAMPLE 2
In a peer-reviewed article on a neurological breakthrough, you do not need to define what an “axon” is. If you do, you’ll insult and alienate your audience and it probably won’t survive editing anyways.
But if you are writing the same article for a magazine read by seniors and retired people, it’d help to provide a definition.
EXAMPLE 3
When writing recipes for professional chefs or an audience of serious amateur cooks, you do not need to explain what “dicing” or “sautéing” is.
But if your article is going to be published on a web site visited by college undergraduates, then it would make sense to explain such cooking terms in a footnote or sidebar.
3 TYPES OF AUDIENCES
During your writing career, you’ll come across three different types of audiences:
1. ENTERTAINMENT: Laypeople looking for entertainment or having a good time. When writing for an Entertainment audience, try to provide a general introduction to the subject matter, followed by entertaining facts, trivia, astonishing news about subject matter, etc.
2. BUSINESS: Businesspeople looking for a concrete benefit, a solution to their specific problem, a way to expand their business and maximize their profits. When writing for a Business audience, try to offer a concrete solution to a problem they have and explain how that solution may help their market share and bottom line.
3. EXPERTS: Science and technology experts, engineers, academicians, professional consultants, who have a firm command of the literature and looking for a well-document innovation or a proof of a new hypothesis to expand the horizons of their knowledge base. When writing for an Expert audience, try to describe a new approach to an old or new theoretical issue that would expand the knowledge-base shared by the experts.
FOR EXAMPLE
Let’s say our topic is ROBOTS.
For an Entertainment audience, you may talk about the new “nanny robots” in Japan that take over babysitting chores from humans or a funny story about a “Robot Whisperer” who trains “pet robots.”
For a Business audience, you can present a plan for the most optimal way to use robots to run warehouses, or present a cost-benefit analysis of replacing waiters in a restaurant with service robots.
For an Expert audience, you can talk about the mathematics of a new algorithm that drives the new generation of Artificial Intelligence robots, or you can present a literature survey of the new “robotic pattern recognition” theories.
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