Jocelyn Zaragoza

English 2010

February 20, 2019

A Good Writer is Always Thinking About Their Audience

What is the point of writing a paper or writing in general if you don't know who your

writing for? This is one of the biggest things good writers think about before they even start

writing. They think about who they want their message to reach or who they are talking to. That

is what it means to be a good writer, choosing and writing for a specific audience. Writers have a

better chance of getting their opinions and ideas out there if they target a specific audience.

Writers that write with no specific audience can sometimes have a hard time finding

people to read their writing because sometimes everyone doesn’t understand the terms or

language used in the writing or they are just not interested in the topic in general. Writers who

target a specific audience are more successful because they have people who are interested in the

topic and understand the writing, this gets a lot more people to read the paper.

Just because most people try to write for a specific audience it doesn’t necessarily mean

that they can’t write for a general audience but when writing the paper, they might have to use

terms that most people know, in other words “dumb” down their words, or whole paper so that it

can reach a bigger audience. The writer also must be willing to write about topics that are

popular in society and what people are most interested in so that more people are willing to read

it. In the article “How to Write for a General Audience: A Guide for Academics Who Want to

Share Their Knowledge with the World and Have Fun Doing It” by Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

she says writing for a general audience “encourages academic authors to spread their wings and
write for a broader audience, rather than the handful of experts in the field who usually read their

papers”(review,pg.318). This was interesting to read because some would assume that writing

for a general audience would be easier than writing for a specific group of people but in this

case, it is a little difficult for the academic authors to do it because they are so used to writing for

a specific audience. So, for them it is difficult to write for a broader audience.

In the article “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” developed by The

Council of Writing Program Administrators and The National Council of Teachers of English it

talks about audiences. It talks about analyzing and understanding audiences. On page six, within

the paragraph about rhetorical knowledge it explains that “by developing rhetorical knowledge,

writers can adapt to different purposes, audiences, and contexts”. This means that a writer can

start a draft for a paper writing for a specific audience and then by the final draft have a

completely different audience because of how their ideas have evolved.

In conclusion good writers always have their audience in mind when writing a paper.

Even if they audience changes from the rough draft to the final draft they always have an

audience. When writers don't have an audience in mind, they have a harder time getting to the

final draft.
 Authors Note

I choose the topic of audience choice as the topic of my paper because I had a hard time

with this and I still to this day have a hard time selecting an audience to write to. I have written

the final draft of my paper and I think I have a good paper after editing my draft based on my

feedback. I believe I did a good job at getting my point across and explaining it well enough so

that the readers could understand my paper. One of the challenges I had while writing the paper

was finding enough credible resources. While doing this project I learned that your audience can

change from the first draft to the final draft and that’s perfectly fine.