Writing Tip: Know Your Target Audience

Writing Tip: Know Your Target Audience

Everything we write has a target audience. Some writers are dedicated to a particular group of people, such as young adults, and others are focused on an audience with a particular interest, such as historical fiction. Audiences can be based on age, gender, race, religion, country, social class, interest and many other things. When we write, we should think about our target audience and what they would like to read.

For example, you wouldn’t include a graphic sex scene in a piece of fiction aimed at teenagers (leave that for a adult fiction!). You also don’t want to include explicit language. Equally, if you’re writing a poem about love, you main audience probably isn’t going to be middle-aged men (though I’m sure some of you really enjoy a good love sonnet if you’re perfectly honest). When you choose the language to include in your work, you need to think about what best suits your audience.

This can also apply to other sections of your writing, such as sentence structure and layout. Younger audiences may not be interesting in large blocks of writing. A poem designed to appeal to a Christian audience would be striking if it was in the shape of a crucifix. If you’re really clever and you want to write about a certain country to interested lovers of travel writing, you could try to create an acrostic poem in the shape of that country. These are things that are designed to attract a certain person to your writing.

When we think about our target audience, we need to consider what will catch their eye and make them likely to read the whole of our work.

Written By: Laura Clark

* Laura is a 23 year old English woman with a history degree residing in the UK. She has been writing for many years and enjoys writing horror/fantasy stories, as well as poetry. You can view her work at: https://inspiredstoriesandpoems.wordpress.com/

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