Who Do We Write For?
When we write, we often worry if we are going to appease our desired audience. Whether you are a student, journalist, or professional writer, no one is immune from the pressure that judgment, opinion, and more can bare down on a piece of work.
We crave acceptance, perfection, and overall, the feeling of success.
Writing for our audience is important, as often having the audience you want to write to in the back of your mind can help you make important decisions regarding context, word choice, and more, giving you a framework for how you should convey your text.
The Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill also provides similar guidance, saying:
“When you’re in the process of writing a paper, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it consciously or not, you always write to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for yourself. ”
William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well, provides a somewhat contradicting opinion, saying that
““Earlier I warned that the reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of distraction or sleep. Now I’m saying you must write for yourself and not be gnawed by worry over whether the reader is tagging along.
I’m talking about two different issues. One is craft, the other is attitude. The first is a question of mastering a precise skill. The second is a question of how you use that skill to express your personality.””
I find Zinsser's point of view quite interesting, though maybe not applicable to every situation.
Being able to write however you want, or even translating your own way of speaking to your writing, is great in theory, as that gives more people an opportunity to write about something they want more passionately and in a way as if they were telling you personally.
James Herndon's novel, How to Survive in Your Native Land, a source cited by Zinsser in his chapter about the audience, is a great example of a passionate person, describing his experiences in his own unique way, something Zinsser calls "full of art".
But not all writing describes your own experiences or passions, most are pieces that have set brand guidelines writers must perform under, or an assignment that your professor is viewing.
Students can't turn in a book report that is written like someone texting their best friend, it needs to be written professionally as if you are an expert on the topic and it will be viewed by other academic professionals. These people aren't able to inject their own mannerisms or passions without getting an F on their paper or a performance review that showed an editor needed to fix half of their story for The New York Times.
Even though Zinsser and I don't quite see eye to eye on writing, I believe he was right to say that we should start writing for ourselves, as more often than not, most people get put off of writing through our experiences not having a choice of what to talk about, or what our paper needs to sound like.
Showing more people the joy that can come from writing, and promoting the uniqueness that people have in their own styles, can offer way more interesting stories from people who have never had a voice in this field.
These are the people that need to hear Zinsser's words, to hear that writing isn't all you remember it being, and just writing what ever and how ever you want can make writing a lot more interesting.
“Audience.” The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 22 Feb. 2021, https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/audience/.
Zinsser, William. “The Audience.” On Writing Well, Harper Paperbacks, 2013.