Purpose & Audience

Introduction

As we have learned, it is important to understand the purpose and audience of a writing assignment. This not only helps us focus our research and writing processes, knowing this information also helps us complete these processes quicker.

When you get directions for an essay, review them to find-out what the purpose and audience hints are. How can you use that information to help with your research and writing processes?

Purpose of Persuasive Writing

Persuasive writing can be used to convince an audience of a multitude of purposes:

Look at your assignment's directions for hints for the purpose of your essay. Then, keep that purpose in mind to help make searching for evidence more efficient as well as writing your arguments easier.

Persuasive Writing Audience

When writing persuasively, always remember the interaction between the writer & the reader. The writer is trying to persuade a reader who may be enthusiastic, resistant, or simply disinterested.

Persuasive writing must be well-organized, but it must also hook the reader & keep him/her engaged.

Does your writing prompt give you any clues to who your audience is for a particular assignment? Remember to keep that audience in mind when you are organizing your paper, choosing evidence, and with your word choice and tone. What would be the best choices to best convince your audience?

Here are some tips when writing for an audience. These tips are further explained in the video to the right.

1. What is the reader's position with respect to you?

2. What is the reader's perspective?

3. What level of knowledge does the reader have about your topic?

4. What do you want your reader to take away from what you write?

Also keep in mind that part of who your audience should be is a group that does not agree with your thesis. This will help you assess what information is needed to persuade that group as why your position or argument is warranted.

Lastly, lots of research in psychology has shown that people respond better to persuasive message when it matches something about them--their personality, values, thinking style, etc. The video to the right shows you how considering psychological patterns improves persuasion success. The video partly discusses appealing to your audience's emotions and logic. This will be discussed further in the next section in our lesson.