As professional writers, we all know the need for preparation before writing our articles. We need to gather facts on what we want to write about. But gathering the best facts and marshalling our best skills in writing and presentation is not enough to guarantee that our articles will be read and appreciated. Your article must be published to the right audience. Your information gathering, therefore, must also include gathering information about your audience and their needs. A well written article that is published to the wrong audience is the same as a poorly prepared article published to the right audience. They both fail.
To a professional writer therefore, it is the audience that is most important because it determines the topic and the contents of your article. What you select and how you present it will depend on what you know will be meaningful to your audience. Therefore you must understand the person you're writing for.
Technically, this is called “audience analysis.” It involves a multiplicity of data but to me, not all factors that may be involved in audience analysis are important. Some are easy to assume. The following three are however key to any successful writing and you have get fairly good answers to them.
1. What is the knowledge of my audience? You will want to find out how much knowledge your audience has about the topic you want to write about. In this age of internet and invisible audience scattered all over the globe, this is a very difficult question to answer, but you must answer it.
Answer to this question will determine how you present your facts. Do some words need special explanations? Do you need to explain some concepts? Or is the topic too local or specialized and complicated? Will the audience find my information interesting and useful?
2. What is the attitude of my audience? What you want to know is the attitude of your readers towards the topic you want to write on. Are they sympathetic? Are they hostile? Or are they apathetic? How will these biases affect their reading or understanding of your topic?
3. What are the interests of my audience? You want to know whether your readers have any immediate interest in the topic you have chosen. And if they don't you should ask yourself: What do I need to do to get them interested?
With good answers to these questions, you can make an informed choice of topics for your article. In addition, you will be able to write articles that are interesting and useful to your audience.
