If the assignment doesn’t specify an audience, you may find it most useful to imagine your classmates reading the paper, rather than your instructor.
#MY HORSE AND ME 2 FOR WHAT AUDIENCE PROFESSIONAL#
The assignment may specify an audience for your paper sometimes the instructor will ask you to imagine that you are writing to your congressperson, for a professional journal, to a group of specialists in a particular field, or for a group of your peers.
#MY HORSE AND ME 2 FOR WHAT AUDIENCE HOW TO#
We give you some tips for reading assignments and figuring them out in our handout on how to read an assignment. The best place to start figuring out how much you should say about each part of your paper is in a careful reading of the assignment. For more about what each field tends to expect from an essay, see the Writing Center handouts on writing in specific fields of study. Different fields also have different expectations. But different assignments call for varying degrees of information. As we said earlier, you want to show your instructor that you know the material.
Does your assignment itself give any clues about your audience?.Might you have more than one audience? If so, how many audiences do you have? List them.Use the following questions to help you identify your audience and what you can do to address their wants and needs:
How do I identify my audience and what they want from me?īefore you even begin the process of writing, take some time to consider who your audience is and what they want from you. Your instructor will say, “He really understands communism-he’s able to explain it simply and clearly!” By treating your instructor as an intelligent but uninformed audience, you end up addressing her more effectively. The clearer your points are, the more likely you are to have a strong essay. Thinking about your audience differently can improve your writing, especially in terms of how clearly you express your argument. Remember that time when you said to yourself, “I don’t have to explain communism my instructor knows more about that than I do” and got back a paper that said something like “Shows no understanding of communism”? That’s an example of what can go awry when you think of your instructor as your only audience. For example, she might decide that those gaps show that you don’t know and understand the material. This leaves it up to the instructor to decide what you are really saying, and she might decide differently than you expect. However, when you write an essay with only your instructor in mind, you might not say as much as you should or say it as clearly as you should, because you assume that the person grading it knows more than you do and will fill in the gaps. Your instructors read and grade your essays, and you want to keep their needs and perspectives in mind when you write. Yes, your instructor or TA is probably the actual audience for your paper. Unless you have an extremely cool grandma to whom you’re very close, it’s likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone. What details and stories might you include? What might you leave out? Now imagine that you’re writing on the same topic but your audience is your best friend. To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you’re writing a letter to your grandmother to tell her about your first month of college. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your argument. 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. When you’re in the process of writing a paper, it’s easy to forget that you are actually writing to someone. This handout will help you understand and write for the appropriate audience when you write an academic essay.