English 421: Technical Writing

Choosing and Writing for an Audience

With everybody working on white papers I figured it would be a good time to bring a very important aspect into the lime light.  That being that when most people write a paper of any kind, they focus on the paper and not the audience.  Big no-no.  This holds especially true with the white paper project as most white papers are written as an advertisement or some type of persuasion for somebody to buy something or do what you want.  If your just writing towards the paper's needs than you have lost the audience already, and without an audience all you have is a paper to burn.

Hence, this article comes into play.  The author goes through some steps of identifying the intended audience and then writing specifically towards them.  The author suggests that knowing who the audience is is only small part of the process.  You must also know what they believe and how to use that to connect to them.  A good idea the author suggests is to actually stat who the audience is in the paper so the reader can feel a real connection with the paper.  The author then continues to explain some key points with your selected audience.

--Aaron