Who Am I Writing for, and Incidentally, Who Am I?

Get to Know the Audience of One

The very concept of an audience is stained with the word's original meaning—a large group of people listening to a speaker. The traditional audience was a mass. Before the Web, we tended to think of our audience as a rather vaguely defined crowd or, perhaps, as a collection of several groups, each of which had a di¤erent interest in our subject matter. A single speech, book, or document would address all these groups, we hoped.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person—and write to that one. — John Steinbeck

On the Web, though, the mass audience is crumbling. In its place, small groups are emerging, forming around common interests, aims, jobs, politics, hobbies, or obsessions. And within these groups, we see individuals arising, demanding that we deliver information specifically tailored to their personal taste. We are moving from a writing situation in which one author addressed a single vast audience to a process in which many individuals exchange information with each other, aided by some people who do more writing than others.

I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow, All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The mass audience was always just a convenient fantasy, allowing us to ignore the complexity of groups with competing aims, and within those groups, individuals, each with a unique perspective. We had no way of knowing each person we were writing to, back then, and we had little useful information about the groups they might be segmented into by marketers intent on persuading them to buy. We were forced to guess what people needed, and we often imagined that the audience was a lot like us and our teammates. As a result, we often failed to connect with people in a meaningful way.

You can't hold a conversation with a faceless cloud of people, a generalized audience such as "beginners" or "experts." You won't get your point across. You will lose them one by one.

The more you know about your visitors, the better you can write for them

When you actually know a lot about the people you are writing for, you can tailor your site to their needs. For example, you can:

• Come up with more of the topics they want.
• Organize those topics the way these people think.
• Use words that they use.
• Adopt a tone they find congenial.
• Tailor your words to the relationship you have developed with them.

Armed with information, access, and power, today's customers can dictate new practices and policies faster than your firm is likely to be able to implement them. — Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak, and Jeffrey Lewis, The Customer Revolution

The more sensitive you are to online conversation and its nuances, the more you can eliminate the odd quirks, biases, and focal points in your prose, so it begins to seem transparent to the readers, that is, you do not rub them the wrong way with your own personal agenda. In part, you are erasing your own originality, but you're doing this for a reason: To make contact, to make sense, to convince, to reach out to this other person. How sociable!

Do you really know your audience? We write for ourselves, for our boss, for our team. Oh, and incidentally, we may draw on the little we know about our audience, too, but that doesn't take us very far. So we soon forget it.

In hundreds of meetings, we have heard clients, bosses, and peers announce that the target audience is, well, beginners, oh, and some experts, too. Enough said. On to the next agenda item.

In situations like that, writers tend to write for each other or the team, rather than the actual consumers of the information. Result: consumers find the prose impenetrable, and gripe about the frightening amount of jargon, the unfriendly tone, and the confusing way the material is organized.

Info consumers are not you. To psyche out what topics really matter to your many different audiences and to develop a tone that works for individual members of that crowd, you need to learn more about them as members of particular niche groups, and, more important, as unique individuals.

Hot Text: Web Writing that Works
Information Consumers Are Pushy - Page 2