In addition to analyzing your main or primary audience, you should also consider if you have immediate and secondary audiences. In many cases, the person who will first read the document is not the primary audience. It could be a manager or editor, an intermediary between the writer and the primary audience – this is the immediate audience. The immediate reader often acts as a form of filter or quality control agent of the information before it reaches the primary reader. Additionally, you could have a secondary audience of readers who are likely to read the document even if they are not the target group. Consider an example. If you submit an article for publication to a specialist magazine, you are writing for a public that is interested in the topic of your article; they are your primary audience. However, before the article reaches this audience, it will be read by the magazine’s editor, who will make the final decision about whether to publish the article or not. The editor is, then, the immediate audience (and maybe the only audience, if he/she rejects the article). If published, the article may also be read by readers who are not primarily interested in the topic: they could be journalism students, for example, studying the article as an example of writing. They would be the secondary audience.
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Audience levels
Thursday, May 10th, 2012Significance of Audience Analysis
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Your audience analysis will determine your choice of content – what and how much information you need to give – and style – how you will present this information. Style refers to the emphasis you put on certain ideas and the tone that you adopt in relation to the information you present: your overall attitude and approach as this manifests in the language you use. Your style is formed through your word choice and sentence structure. So, following the results of your audience analysis, you may decide to show a lighthearted approach through your writing – or maybe an evaluative, serious, pompous or respectful approach. In all, for a text to be successful, there must be writer-reader complicity. In other words, the readers must feel that the writer is on their side, supporting their interests and respecting their needs. If readers feel that a writer treats them as an example of a general category, rather than as specific individuals or a specific company, they are more likely to resist accepting the information given.
Factors of Audience Analysis
Monday, May 7th, 2012Demographic analysis
Demographic analysis works on the principle that the population can be grouped, and that each group shows a tendency to think or behave in broadly similar ways. Demographic characteristics include the following:
- Gender
- Occupation
- Social class (i.e. income level)
- Age
- Location/nationality (i.e. international or local audience)
From a person’s demographic profile, certain inferences can be made about their degree of knowledge, expectations and aspirations, though they are not always foolproof For example, in most Western societies a middle-class white woman is probably educated to upper secondary school or tertiary level- but not necessarily. Also, teenagers are not likely to be classical music fans, but, again, this may not always be so. Demographic research is based on the lowest common denominator of prevailing social trends and, there- fore, operates mostly on stereotype.
Factors of Audience Analysis
Friday, May 4th, 2012Status
Status refers to the writer’s degree of authority and/or power relative to the reader. Are you writing to your boss, to a group of peers, or to someone who is junior to you’? Is your reader a client with whom you intend to continue doing business, or the general public that you can only see from a bird’s eye view’? Are you an expert presenting information to a non-specialist audience, or a novice showing to an authority how much you know about a subject? These features refer to the status of the writer and his writing.
Factors of Audience Analysis
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012Marketing executives and consumer researchers, who have a strong interest in understanding market responses, and who, therefore, conduct extensive research in mass perceptions, take into account five factors of audience analysis:
- Technical background
- Status
- Attitude
- Demographics
- Psychographics
Technical background refers to the readers’ knowledge (or lack of knowledge) in the topic that you are writing about. How much technical terminology should you use to avoid sounding either too condescending or too obscure? Should you begin with the big picture to put the reader into perspective, or go straight to the details that you want to focus on? Are you writing to people of the same educational background as yours (i.e. your peers), or to those of different training?





