WRITING 101

Understanding Audience: Creating an Engaging Reader Experience

Figuring out your audience is key to actually affecting them

Some projects, methods, and lectures work really well over the years. Students are talking, passionate, ready to participate, and excited to work. Others are hit-or-miss and I find myself looking for signs of interaction, understanding, and questions as I teach. Having a live “audience” for my teaching allows me to make changes on the fly. But the consideration of who is actually in my class is much more planned.

On the first day, I get writing samples, learn names and some personal details, and watch how the class of strangers acts with each other. By examining them in the first session, it helps me to design future lessons to play to their strengths and provide extra support on things that this group struggles with.

The better I get at observing each class and creating a “profile” of sorts about their skills, interests, and interactions, the more engaging lessons I am able to create. This means fewer days that “flop” and leave us all struggling to gain traction on a topic.

When we begin to write, we can get bombarded by structures, forms, tips, tricks, and strategies that are meant to scaffold and help us to create something. However, it isn’t very often that we go into the “why” behind how those things actually work.

Additionally, many people actually forget that the goal of writing something is a specific purpose. This purpose of getting your reader to think, do, or feel something is key to developing something great.

The hard part, though, is understanding that if you don’t really know your audience, you won’t know how to get people to do, think, or feel those things.

When I teach advertisement analysis, figuring out audience is something similar to understanding purpose in that my students often start with very vague statements:

“The audience is people who like soda.”

“The target audience is adults who can afford to buy expensive cars.”

But there is so much more to identifying audience than just a topical approach. Rather than targeting people who can afford expensive cars, an ad may target people who want to feel like they can afford that type luxury but actually can’t afford it. Instead of just creating a blanket statement about who we are writing for, we need to dig a bit deeper.

Things to consider

For audience, we’ll dive into some specific questions and considerations that can help you narrow your audience from “all people” to your ideal readers.

Demographics

My students are initially really uncomfortable with this part of identifying audience as it can sometimes feel reliant on stereotypes and many of them are uncomfortable talking about specific groups in our society in fear of being seen as prejudice, phobic, etc. However, marketers know that different demographics value different things, and therefore, are more likely to respond positively (or negatively) to certain things included in their ads.

Similarly, our writing may be more or less effective depending on who it is that we are targeting. Some things to consider:

• What age range does your reader fall into?
• How do they identify themselves?
• What is their educational background (note: education is not just traditional schooling)?
• What does their lifestyle look like? What do they want it to look like?
• Are there any things (like neurodivergence) that might affect how they receive information?

Expectations

We choose novels based on titles and covers. We listen to songs by artists (or in genres) that we know we already like. We all have preferences that create boundaries of what we are willing to consume.

But there’s plenty of room to expand those boundaries. We can’t do that, though, without knowing what those boundaries are.

Depending on the medium that you’re using, your reader will expect information to be delivered in a certain format, including certain things, and avoiding others.

For example, I am a big fan of YouTube shorts and TikToks because my attention is able to bounce around to a ton of different topics within a short period of time. If there’s a video over 3 minutes, I skip to the end or pass by it completely. It just doesn’t appeal to me because I use those platforms expecting quick delivery.

The level of familiarity that a reader has with the genre, writing style, tropes, etc. plays a big role in accessing their prior knowledge and the emotional touchstones that they are looking for.

The key here is to look to your own experience as a consumer and identify what your own expectations are. If you are similar to the audience that you are trying to reach, there’s a good chance that there will be some overlap in expectations.

However, it is also essential to note that breaking expectations is an expectation of its own. Identify what makes your writing unique and use it to expand the readers’ definition of a genre, trope, theme, etc. Take their expectations as a starting place and expand it to make it your own.

Prior Knowledge

Especially in nonfiction, understanding the knowledge that your audience already has can make or break your effectiveness. If you present them with basic information, but they’re experts, they’ll stop reading and/or feel insulted. On the other hand, if it is too technical and you’re writing for beginners, it can be intimidating, confusing, and frustrating.

So, consider what experience your ideal reader already has with this topic. Is that experience professional, casual, intense, dated, or something else that might affect what information you need to include?

Similarly, what context do they have for your piece? Are they return readers or long-time fans? Did they do a topic search out of necessity or curiosity? Those kinds of questions can help you figure out what to include or leave out, or where you need to expand, simplify, or demonstrate.

A final thing to consider about prior knowledge is whether or not the reader needs a reminder or an explanation. If they are familiar with a concept, maybe they just want enough to be reminded or have something reaffirmed during the reading. If they are in need of an explanation, not providing enough information will be a turn off.

Next steps

So, what do you do once you’ve come up with the answers to these questions and have some identifying pieces for your target audience?

• Create an avatar/persona for your reader: a hypothetical reader you are writing directly for. Some writers use people in their lives while others create them from scratch.
• Close read similar pieces: look for the things that were effective to you and, if possible, check out the reactions, comments, etc. that other readers share and take note of what worked and what didn’t. Try to figure out why.
• Plan out your strategies to affect them (ethos, logos, etc.): different audiences will be more influenced by stats on certain topics, but emotions on others. What affects your target audience the most?
• Implement your strategies: word choice, emotional stories, imagery, credible sources, and even the timing of when you share your writing could all be used to impact your audience.
• Revise through the lens of the reader: you can even get some beta readers to provide feedback so that you can change anything that didn’t resonate or actually works against your overall purpose.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot of overlap with figuring out your purpose for writing something and, honestly, they should work together and be planned out before you even begin to write.

Ultimately, thought, we send our writing out into the world and hope for the best, but being mindful about audience can go a long way. Here’s some closing reminders to consider:

• Who (specifically) are you writing for?
• What do they bring to the text?
• Why are they reading?
• How you can best affect them?