What I would like to discuss is finding your audience and audience recognition. In writing as in marketing it is important to know your audience but I believe the best way to know them is to find them. What are their likes and dislikes and more importantly what catches their attention.

In today’s society we are facing more audiences as writers then ever before. I’m not referencing assigned writing in which the audience is predetermined, but I’m referring to unsolicited writings such as the magazine I’ve proposed. There are so many audiences within audiences that it’s hard to determine who’s who.

The old way of breaking audiences down into demographics is still relevant. But I believe that recognition of the micro-demographic is very important to effective writing. As technical writers we should have the ability to craft a message that can reach an audience with the blanket like coverage of a rainstorm but we must also posses the ability to reach an audience with the precision of a laser guided missile. It is in that need to be precise that I now more than ever question my recognition of who my audience and what language and/or techniques I should use to reach them.

We call ourselves writers and that is a bold claim. We live in country with a large number literate citizens. The masses have the ability to put pen to paper and write down a few words, which the reader can reasonably make sense of what idea is being conveyed. But for us, who call ourselves writers, we have the ability to put pen to paper and convey a message, an idea, a thought, and have them make perfect sense. Almost everyone can writer but few are writers.

As writers we must remember one basic element of our craft and that's writing is a form of communication. The reason I bring this simplistic point to the forefront is that we must remember that in communication there is a sender and a receiver (the audience). If the message that we send isn’t clear and concise for the reader then this aspect of communication is lost. I feel that the only way we can truly know make our messages palatable to our audiences is to really understand them, and because the number of audiences have become so vast this job has become more difficult.