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Who's your Audience?

© Emily Thrush

Forget all the old rules you learned in freshman composition about comma splices, split infinitives, dangling prepositions and passive verbs! Most of those rules have been thrown out anyway, even by the English teachers who defend the language against change . The key to communicating well is thinking about your audience. The same sentence that carries a strong message to one reader or listener might be meaningless with another. For example,

1. "The reader's linguistic schemata is as important as the reader's prior knowledge of the content ('content schemata') and of the rhetorical organization."

This sentence is quite clear to students of reading theory, but probably unreadable for most people. How about this:

2. "You need to know how well your reader reads and what your reader knows about your topic."

Better? Of course it is. The only excuse for sentence 1 is that every field has its own language (its jargon), and experts in each field are expected to know that jargon.

For example, "URL", "web address", and "bookmark" are all jargon related to use of the WWW. As an experienced web user, you are probably familiar with all those terms. But if you were teaching someone how to use the web, you would need to explain or define these terms before using them.

Things you need to know about your audience:

1. What is their general reading level?

Most high school graduates in the U.S. have an eighth-grade reading level. That's the level at which most newspapers are written. Reading level is determined by difficulty of vocabulary, length of sentences and complexity of sentences (how many parts there are to the sentence.) Even when people can read at a very high level, they usually prefer to read material at a somewhat easier level. If you make your writing easy and clear, your audience is much more likely to read it and remember it.

2. What is their knowledge of the subject? You may need to include background information or define terms for readers unfamiliar with your topic.

3. What is your audience's purpose? If what you have to say is vitally interesting to your audience, they are more likely to be willing to work a little at understanding you. However, we rarely have a captive outside outside of school settings. Professionals are busy and have many calls on their attention. If you want a piece of their time, you have to make your message clear and intersting. You may have to start by telling them exactly why your message should be interesting to them - don't assume that they will figure it out. I once had a boss who announced a department meeting - on the third page of a memo describing some changes in department procedures that didn't affect many people. No one showed up at the meeting, because no one had read the memo all the way through!