To Whom Am I Writing?
To Whom Am I Writing? Learning the Discipline of Understanding Audiences and Writing to Them
If there is a lesson to be learned about Audience from the JWT ad and the other examples I have cited, it is this: You cannot succeed as a writer without empathy. Leaving aside a journal or diary, you are rarely—never?—writing for yourself. So, then: Who is this “audience”? What are their Tag Heuer Replica expectations, needs, interests? Not your half-baked assumptions and projections, but the reality!
In my writing (which for over 20 years has been to educators) I get out of myself only with much effort. For the first few stabs and initial drafts, I am pretty much writing to myself or an amorphous reader. I am figuring out what it is I really think, and what, if anything, I have to say. But it isn’t until I start to reread the early drafts with specific teachers in mind that my writing starts to become more empathetic. Would Shelley make sense of this as a primary-grades teacher? Would Bill the algebra teacher know what in the world I was talking about—and care about the idea? Can fifth-grade teachers like Andrea and Jo use this, or will it seem too pointy-headed intellectual?
Alverno College has long been known as a pioneer in curriculum and assessment designed back-wards from worthy tasks and accomplishments. In addition to having built a competency-based curriculum framework, their assessments consistently focus students on audience and purpose. Here is a simple example from an early writing assignment in a chemistry class: ‘”All aspirin is alike,’ says a friend. True or false? Explain to your non-chemistry-trained friend what you know as a chemist.”
Below is an excerpt from a rubric used college-wide at Alverno College, in which both the teacher and the writer score the work?
1. REACHING AUDIENCE through establishing of common context (clarifying limits of situation and sources of thinking)
2. .REACHING AUDIENCE through verbal expression (showing relation between audience and writer through word choice, style and/or tone)
From here it is an easy jump to what all the best writers know. There is no such thing as a vast monolithic audience. You write to subgroups and individuals. You don’t pitch the same detergent, venture-capital proposal, romance novel, or political vision to everyone. It is easy to make fun of focus groups in Cartier Pasha Replica Watches advertising and politics, but the concept is democratic and wise: there are many different “audiences” in our audience, and we need to figure out what they think, feel, expect, and need if we hope to reach one or more of them. Then, you realize—humbly, as I have—that you cannot possibly reach everyone in your world (in my case, the world of education). You usually have to find your most simpatico audience, to find your niche as a writer.
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