Marketing your article to a specific audience will save considerable time and energy if time is spent in the beginning by brainstorming their needs. Considering your audience is a mixture of marketing and psychology. You must first question who would be your reader. Then question how they would identify with or enjoy reading your work. Planning ahead helps develop the perfect tone and topic for your intended audience.

The easiest way to factor an audience into your editing is to read it as if you were your own reader, rather than the writer. This is accomplished by stepping back from your writing, allowing a day to two, and then reading it with your reader in mind. Ask yourself the following questions: “If I were reading this for the first time, would it be confusing?” or “Is this something I would be interested in reading if I were my audience?”

Imagine that you have been asked to compose an essay about your life that your children will someday read. What would you say? How would you say it? What details would you include knowing that it would only be read by your children?

Now imagine that you have been given the same task, only this time the essay would be published in a national magazine. Knowing that this essay would be read by your friends and family—as well as by your employer, your peers, and by perfect strangers—how would it differ from the first one? Would the details be different? Would your tone change? Would you leave out a few details for the sake of possible embarrassment or misunderstanding?

In each case, the audience of your work makes a difference in what you write. In fact, one of the first things you learn as a writer is to consider the audience. Regardless of the genre, style, or purpose of your writing, consideration of audience is vital in writing effectively. In the above scenarios, your tone, choice of words, and depth of intimacy in your writing would probably differ between the two documents—although both were basically on the same topic. Having an understanding of your audience before you approach any writing task is crucial to a successful outcome.

For example, suppose you need a paper on Shakespeare’s poetic techniques as a college assignment. You are aware that your professor is a preeminent Shakespearian scholar, so there is likely no need to explain the terminology used within the paper or the credentials of the resources used.

However, if you fail to follow through with your arguments and explanations in a concise and thorough way, the professor could see it as a weakness. This is especially true of most undergraduate-level writing, as professors tend to want to see your ability to explain your thesis, rather than your ability to astound them with your relevant and innovative slant on the topic. However, academic writing for dissertations and future publication in academic journals is slightly different. In these cases, it is generally safe to assume that your audience is familiar with the basics of the topic, requiring less explanation on your part of the commonly known terms and/or theories.

In other forms of writing. particularly creative writing, audience should always be your first consideration. If you are writing an article, short story, or novel for hopes of future publication, knowing your audience shapes the wording. Many writers consider the audience as a springboard for coming up with the content, rather than the other way around. They might find a particular niche or magazine that is looking for fresh content, and then later decide upon a topic after researching the intended audience.

For example, a regional magazine that focuses on rural living would have a readership interested in all facets of country life. A writer seeking publication within this magazine would consider the readership, read past articles published by the magazine to determine the reading level of the readership, then come up with a concept and topic accordingly. In this situation, an article about heirloom recipes or seasonal gardens would definitely be chosen for publication over one about public transportation or urban schools.

The reverse of this process is to just create a document or essay based on what you want to say and then hope you can find an audience who will appreciate it. With all the technology available to writers today, this can be done; however, it might waste valuable time and energy. The best advice to writers will be to know the audience from the very beginning.