No matter how ambitious writers may be, they must have a specific audience in mind for anything they write. No one truly writes for a general audience, nor has a reason to. A novel can climb to the top of the New York Times best-seller list if it sells 8,000-10,000 copies in a week — which sounds impressive, until you remember the U.S. adult population is almost 250 million, and the proportion who read novels is considerably lower. A novelist, no matter how talented and dedicated, is not going to appeal to most of them. A non-fiction author may sincerely believe his or her topic is absolutely essential for everyone to understand, and he or she may even be right, but most people will still choose to do something else with their time than read about it.
Professional and scholarly writing obviously aims at a much narrower audience, one that typically belongs to a specific discourse community. One of the most common mistakes students make when writing is that they fail to focus on a specific group of readers. Almost inevitably, that means they fail to define a specific purpose. For example, a student may be passionately concerned with the topic of autism and want to write about it, but defining a clear purpose will be impossible if he or she doesn’t decide if the project’s audience will be psychological professionals, teachers, administrators, legislators or other government officials, or academics studying some aspect of autism. In turn, without a clear sense of purpose, a writer cannot conform to the conventions of a specific genre. Each of those audiences wants and expects different things when reading about autism. The jargon that each group can understand will vary widely, as will the conventions of the different genres with which each group is familiar. Stylistically, what works well in one context would be off-putting in another. An audience of parents of an autistic child or people on the spectrum themselves would require even more radical adjustments. Your sense of audience guides dozens of decisions, large and small, you will need to make about your project.
For this exercise, you must begin to decide on your audience, and thus your genre and purpose. Who will be reading your project? Where will it appear? I am limiting your choice of audience, in that you should assume you are not aiming at a popular audience, such as when one writes a feature for Time or The Washington Post Sunday Magazine. For example, you might be presenting your paper at an academic or professional conference. If so, which one? What organization puts it on? You may be writing for a scholarly journal or trade publication. Again, which one? Conceivably, you might aim this project at a government agency or a private organization. For example, a project about Bebop could be submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities in hopes or receiving a grant for more ambitious study, the African-American History Museum as the foundation for a new exhibit, or the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz as a contribution to its math, science, and music educational program.
Write a thoughtful and well-organized exercise in which you define your target audience clearly and explain why that audience would be interested in your project. Can you anticipate any ways in which this choice of audience will affect your approach to your project?