Know thy audience | Tracings

In a comment to my last book review, lattejust4me said she had similar problems with The Seraph Seal and ?thought I wasn?t smart enough to get it.? My reply grew to four paragraphs before I edited it, so I realized it needed to be a blog post.

When a piece of writing confuses us, should we feel we?re at fault? I say no. Either the work in question is poorly written/edited, or we?re not the intended audience.

My journalism and technical writing professors both gave some good advice on this subject:

From my journalism professor: Short paragraphs, short sentences, use English words instead of foreign ones (this is for an English-speaking readership, of course), and write to the audience?s reading level.

From my technical writing professor, the 11th Commandment: Know thy audience.

Now, my journalism professor was speaking specifically of writing for newspapers, and he was dispensing these bits of wisdom in the 1980s, when the average U.S. reading level was at 8th grade. His point was that just because you can write long, Jane Austen-like paragraphs and sentences, and just because you might be a walking reference library, that doesn?t mean you should brain dump all your knowledge into your articles.

(And yes, I see the irony in that last paragraph, but I can?t figure out how to break it down any further other than using commas.)

My technical writing professor?s advice was about both format and content. She often told us we shouldn?t write at our audience, but to it. Don?t present a poem at a business meeting or a quarterly financial report at a poetry reading.

So, to sum up: if we don?t get what we?re reading, it?s not our fault. If our readers don?t get what they?re reading, it is our fault.

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Writer, hoopdancer, sometime photographer and jewelry maker.

Source: http://tracibonney.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/know-thy-audience/

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