BC MANUAL

Bridgewater College Online Writing Manual

Considering Your Audience

An important consideration for any writer is the potential audience - or reader - of the text the writer is planning.

• When you are writing to convey information, you need a sense of what your reader is likely to know about the topic already. Will your reader be a generalist or a specialist in the area you're writing about? What information does he or she need in order to understand what you have to say? (Thinking about audience also helps you determine what to cite, applying the "common knowledge" principle. Can you assume everyone in your American history class knows what the Dred Scott decision is? If so, you may feel comfortable making a passing reference to it without citing your source of information.)
• When you are writing to persuade a reader to share your point of view, you need a sense of your reader's pre-existing opinions and attitude toward the topic. Is he or she likely to disagree with you and, therefore, be difficult to convince? Is he or she a sympathetic reader who will readily accept your point of view? Is he or she a skilled critical reader, who typically challenges the arguments and evidence he or she reads? How much information is your reader likely to have on the topic? As you plan your paper, you will probably find it useful to outline a reader's potential counterarguments against your position, so that you may anticipate them in presenting your own case.
• When you write to reflect, drawing on your personal experience, you may find it useful to consider how much (or how little) experience you share with your reader. If you are recounting an incident that occurred in your high school, how much information do you need to make the setting and context clear for readers at your college, most of whom attended different high schools with different curricula and requirements? If you are a nontraditional student writing for a classroom audience that includes much younger students, you need to explain references to events and elements of popular culture that they may not remember.

Take a few minutes to write down everything you know about what your readers bring to the topic. Use this knowledge to determine what details and explanations you need to include in your paper.

Updated by A. L. Trupe, Sept. 2006