Chapter
Just as the first commandment in any business is “Know thy customer,” so the first in communication is “Know thy audience.”
Knowing your audience and their needs is an important planning step that will help you adapt your content and writing to ensure you are meeting the needs of your readers. Just as any business thrives or dies by how well it supplies a customer demand, any act of communication’s success depends entirely on how well the sender tailored it to meet the needs and expectations of the audience.
Sometimes, that audience is a person or group you know; sometimes, it’s a person or group you don’t, but you always adjust your message content and style to what you know or can guess about them. You wouldn’t speak to a customer approaching you for the first time the same way you would a co-worker buddy, nor would you speak to your manager the same way you would speak to either of the others. In each case, you adjust the level of detail in your content, as well as your tone, word choices (diction), grammar, and overall style (formal or casual) based on how you’ve profiled your audience.
Profiling or analyzing your audience takes skill and consideration. When you sit down to write, ask yourself the following questions:
- How big is my main audience? Is it one person, two, a few, several, a dozen, dozens, hundreds, or an indeterminately large number (the public)?
- Who might my secondary or tertiary audiences be (e.g., people you can see CC’d or people you can’t because they could be forwarded your email without you knowing)?
- What is my professional or personal relationship with them relative to their position/seniority in their organization’s hierarchy?
- How much do they already know about the topic of my message?
Writing for Audiences of Various Sizes
Writing to one person is a relatively straightforward task, but sometimes you must adjust your writing style to accommodate a larger audience. When emailing one person, for instance, you can address them by name in the opening salutation and continue to use the second person singular you throughout. When addressing two or three, say for a project that involves 2 to 3 partners (including you, making 3 to 4 altogether), you would likewise address them each by name, either in alphabetical order or in order of who is primarily involved and then descending in size of contribution. Past four, however, you may start to use collective salutations such as “Hello, team,” or “Hi, all.” Luckily, the second-person plural pronoun you is the same as the singular. For a small audience such as this, your style can generally follow the conversational rapport you’ve developed with them, whether that be formal or informal, humorless or humorous, literal or expressive, and so on.
The larger the group, however, the more general and accessible your language has to be. When writing for an indeterminately large group such as the consumer public, say in a blog on your company’s website, your language must be