It’s taken a while to write this post. To be honest, the first two steps of writing I talk about with my students seem the most obvious. Much has been said about them, in more detail, in more clever ways, in more profound ways . . . well, you get the picture.
The first two steps I talk about are about the conversation of writing: know your audience, and know your purpose. To put it another way, who are you writing to and what are you wanting to say? You’re not just throwing out words into the void (or at least you hope not. “Ground control to Major Tom . . .”). You may not be able to see the person on the other end of the conversation, but you ARE having a conversation, and some of the rules of good conversation also apply to good writing. So first, who are you writing to?
To best answer that, let’s look at commercials. If you turn on the Hallmark Channel, you might get sappy commercials for exotic cruises and romantic getaways that you can share with your spouse to put the spark back into your marriage (I don’t watch the Hallmark channel, so I’m only guessing). Turn on ESPN, and there are Nike shoe commercials, Reebok clothing commercials,
commercials for sports drinks that make your sweat orange and purple as you stare like a wild animal into your opponent’s face, growling, and then shatter them into a million pieces as you dunk a basketball over their heads and apply Speedstick to your underarms simultaneously. Or, turn on Fox, and watch multiple gold investment commercials, retirement commercials, commercials for erectile dysfunction and better bladder control, or how you can call a law firm to sue a company that misapplied a surgical mesh.
Here’s what these commercials on these different channels all have in common: they know their audience, or more specifically, what makes them tick. They know their interests, hobbies, and fears based on things like their age, gender, geographic area, economic status, education, race, religious preference, or sexual preference. They know how to push the buttons of greed, security, desire, coolness. In short, they know their audiences very well. By trial and error, and sometimes market research, they have learned not to advertise sports cars on Nickelodeon, or Lucky Charms on CNN. It’s the wrong demographic.
Effective communication to your audience will take these differences into consideration. If you’re writing to a general audience, use multiple illustrations that appeal to a variety of audiences (i.e. don’t always use sports illustrations). I try to give a lot of movie examples, because it seems to be an area of cultural common ground (though I may be shutting out those who don’t watch movies). Overall, this works well, though I’ve had a couple audiences where no one had seen Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Forrest Gump. I try to vary male and female pronouns as I give illustrations, and try to give examples specific to the area where I live.
Taking these differences into consideration, and finding examples that communicate well to different demographics may seem basic, but it seems to be worth addressing. It’s easy to become myopic.
For this section, here’s the bottom line: writing is a conversation between two or more people. As the writer, we bring our preferences, individuality, and experiences to the writing, but our readers bring theirs as well. The more variety we can use in the illustrations and examples we use to communicate our ideas, the more bridges we build between different demographic groups.
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