Thoughts On "Knowing Your Audience"

01 Jul 2020

TL;DR

People should write with an audience in mind, and use this audience to help focus their content. This is solid advice that helped me a lot in my life; however, if I write solely for “the audience”, the writing process feels unfulfilling. After compromising on what I’ve wanted to write about (for a long time), I’ve realized I should write and stylize for myself every once in a while (i.e the most important audience is me)! To make my posts a bit more palatable, I might split them up into smaller posts that focus on one aspect.

Thoughts on “Writing for an Audience”

A piece of advice I have gotten (and seen on the web) is some variation of “write for your audience” - the idea being that writers should tailor their content (subject, depth, tone, etc) to fit people that would read their work. Satirical writing should be humorous, academic papers should be rigorous, and medium articles should be vacuous (haha). This piece of advice was transformative and helped guide me on details and explanations I should and shouldn’t include in writing and presentations.

This means we probably should not:

• Use slang in a formal presentation
• “Dumb down” technical details to experts
• Throughly cover technical details to people that don’t need it
• Teach neural networks to babies¹

The favorite example was when my supervisor critiqued our intern “industry primer” for cryptocurrencies. When she got to the technical breakdown of cryptocurrencies, she said “I promise you that the people won’t read this and don’t care… You got to remember who you’re writing this for”. Although it was disheartening to hear at the moment, she had a good point. Traditional investors looking into crypto don’t care about the proofs in cryptography, consensus mechanism, distributed systems, etc; they’re more likely to care about the benefits and risks with crypto². On the other end, you shouldn’t be re-explaining fundamentals of any field to seasoned experts (ex: What is matrix multiplication?) - they’re already familiar with the fundamentals (definition of expert) and you’re just wasting their time.

But who is (or should be) my audience?

When I started compiling content for this site, I got stuck on “who is this for?” Popular advice on the internet is to “build a portfolio blog” to yadda yadda yadda. I had a notion that I wanted to display past works/projects I’ve done, but I struggled to lock down the specifics.

If I were…

1) Explaining a technical aspect: I would include details of the procedures, documented results, comparisons to alternatives, citations, etc.

2) If I were trying to sell something: I would be creating some end-product to try to impress someone.

3) Narrating to a friend: I would probably skim details and focus on the emotional aspects of a project - along with any frustrating issues or problems that popped in the middle.

If I tried to include all of theses - the end piece would be a mess, and no one would be happy. Should I be creating this site for my recruiters, potential supervisors, or my peers?

Understanding what I want

Another facet of this audience dilemma is understanding what I want in a writeup. I think the “answer” or “final product” of any deliverable is only a small piece of the work, and the narration, exploration, problem solving, and explanation give a completeness to presenting your experience. In a professional setting, large chunks of this “completeness” would (and should) be cut out. Otherwise, you’re wasting the client’s time.

However, I want to recreate my favorite aspects of my favorite blogs/posts/videos. Some common themes from these pieces are:

1) Narration: I enjoy narration of the steps to reach the goal along with observing attempts at solutions as a part of the documentation. An example of “Taking the caffeine out of RedBull so I can drink it at night”

2) Completeness/Experimentation: I enjoy completeness/a variety of experiments performed to demonstrate a concept or achieve a better solution in research papers or stack overflow posts. Here’s an example of a this completeness in response to “Why is [] faster than list()?” (python)

3) Cleverness: I love it when a tricky problem has a “clever” solution (like elegant project euler solutions or a hacky fix)

Unfortunately, I think these attributes in a text form makes content unpalatable. If you want to be entertained, you want narration. If you want to understand something, you want completeness. If you want to do something fast, you need cleverness. I think the people who would like this overlap is small. Some examples:

• Someone looking for a quick fix does not want to read 5 pages of documentation and experimentation
• Someone looking to understand linear algebra does not want narration
• Someone looking for a entertaining story does not want all of small little details

I don’t think anyone would ever want all three of these things when they’re trying to learn something. At most, I think a typical audience member would only want two of the above attributes.

Audience != you

Overall, I think an important part of “writing for your audience” means accepting that what your audience wants and what you want don’t always align. In the perfect world, you and the audience want that exact same thing, but in my personal experiences this has never happened³.

This “unpalatable” content I described exists and there is an audience that loves it (if you look at the views of Linus Tech Tips or NileRed’s videos), but I suspect viewers are just attracted to the spectacle⁴ of their videos rather than qualities I described.

Even though it dampens the fun of writing it’s necessary to cut out parts that you think is interesting, but your audience doesn’t and vice versa (you have to include things that you think aren’t interesting, but your audience does).

Conclusion

Writing for your audience is a good piece of advice and has a lot of important implications. For me, it’s a reminder that what I want to see in my work can be different than what other people want to see. I want to write for myself, but this focus can end up alienating all the other audience groups. For now, I won’t focus the content of each writeup to a specific audience (might be a bad idea).

What I will try is to make writeups in two pieces: a monolith and a light⁵ version. The monolith will contain all the details and explanations that I wanted to include in a writeup while the light version will contain the core/focus of the writeup. This can be a lot of work, but I think it’ll might be worth it. Not every blog post will be tailored to the same person, and I think that’s fine. Plus, it’ll be good writing practice!

Worst case scenario I just dump everything on medium.com.

Footnotes