Genre and Audience and Why It's Important!!! Aaron and Beth

The first thing to consider when beginning your writing process, you need to remember your audience. Without properly understanding your audience, you are going to find it hard to decide on a genre for your writing process. Considering your audience is one of the most important steps in your writing process because it's hard to keep a fifth grader hooked when your writing is so formal you sound like you are talking to someone in a college setting.

Audience is the person or the group of people that your writing is targeted towards. Different audiences will require you to use different tones, diction, and style throughout your writing.

In the Commencement Address at Choate-Rosemary Hall by Billy Collins, he is addressing a class of high school seniors at their graduation. So by determining this audience, he understood that he needed to use a genre they could relate to, and use formal language since it was a graduation ceremony. He gave examples of what to expect next in life because he understood that they were about to enter a new realm and start a new chapter of their life.

Where does Audience fit into your writing process?

Audience should be one of the most important factors when thinking about your writing process. Determining your audience early allows you to think of ways to understand them and helps you keep their attention throughout your writing. The audience makes the paper stay focused throughout the entire process.

Understanding your audience is also going to help you find the proper genre to engage your audience throughout your entire paper.

The proper genre for the proper audience

"Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A lot of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind." - Nicholas Sparks

Once you have determined your audience, you need to figure out what genre you want to work with. Whether it be an article, a research paper, or a speech the audience will help you determine the right way to approach the situation.

Instead of an article or a paper, Martin Luther King Jr decided to use the genre of a letter to get his message across to the clergymen but in essence to the entire world. A letter to a specific audience was a way to get his point to the entire community because a letter is more formal and personal rather than an article or interview. Since his audience was more of an upscale/higher class audience, he needed to use a formal style when he wrote his letter and it made it seem more of a pressing issue because it was important to him, it was something that needed to be handled as soon as possible.

Reflect on Reflection

Using reflection during your writing process is just as important as audience and genre. Reflecting on your writing, will help you think about what you wrote, who your audience was, and how go about perfecting the relationship between what you wrote and the audience.

Yancey defines reflection as, " the processes by which we know what we have accomplished and by which we articulate accomplishment and the products of those processes."

Most of the time we are reflecting on things and don't even realize we are. When reflecting, it's something that takes time to do, it's not just a one to two minute thinking process. It helps you think back to what you wrote and helps you reassure yourself that you wanted to say everything that you needed to say in your writing when finishing the final copy.