It's the Audience, Stupid

The most important thing to think about when you're writing is the audience.

Whether you're writing a corporate announcement, a marketing brochure, an email, a tweet, or a user manual, your audience is everything. And it's the only thing.

If you don't know who you're writing to, you can't write. At the very least, you can't write effectively. You have to know who the audience is to know what works with them.

I've driven quite a few managers up various walls by insisting on identifying the audience before we ever began talking about the message we needed to communicate. I know why they were blowing a fuse, too; it's because they hadn't stopped to think who the audience would be. They only thought about sending out a message.

In any kind of business writing, the audience is the absolute key. Is the audience made up of line employees ("worker bees" as we've called them at too many places where I've worked)? Is the audience made up of mid-level managers? Is your audience executive row? You really need to know which group you're writing for, because each group has its own hot buttons and its own sore spots. Hit the wrong one and your message misses by a mile. But when you hit the right buttons, your message nails a bulls-eye.

You say your message is going outside the company? Okay, who is the audience? Is it the customer base? Is it a group of prospects? Is it your suppliers? Each of those audiences has different relationships with you and expects different kinds of information. In addition, each audience has different motivations. You really need to keep all of that in your head when you're crafting your message.

You're a journalist or a fiction writer? You need to keep the audience in mind, too. But I'll have more on that in a future post.

A Love of Writing

I truly love writing. I love wrangling with the English language in my attempts to convey a message with creativity or mere cleverness. I love it when it's going well and when it's going badly.

I even love it when I realize someone else has captured my attitude toward the craft more eloquently than I could. Check out this blog post, which my friend Jeff Kraft identified for me.

Enjoy the post. I hope to have something of my own very soon.

Joy of a Morning Run

There really is nothing comparable to the joy I feel during a run in the early morning.

At an early hour, there is very little traffic on the streets of my village, so I don't have to be so concerned about safety. At an early hour, I can run for miles outside and still enjoy the solitude of exercising my body by myself. In the quiet of the early morning I can listen to the sound of my shoes on the pavement, the sound of my breathing, and sometimes even the beat of my heart.

During the winter months an early morning run means I run in darkness. Although it seems like a contradiction, the darkness heightens my awareness of everything around me. Sounds are sharper, the air is crisper, and the pavement somehow seems more unforgiving than usual. I feel full of energy and I'm ready for anything to happen--and it sometimes feels as though something will happen.

But these days the sun breaks the horizon well before 6 am, and I am often watching it rise as I run. The combination of the sun's first light and the energy that comes from running fills me with exhilaration. It's incredibly uplifting, and I'm grateful for the experience.

There is joy to be felt during an early morning run. One of these days I'm going to describe it well.

40 Years After Kent State

Tuesday, May 4, is the 40th anniversary of the Kent State massacre. On that day the Ohio Army National Guard opened fire on Kent State University students protesting the war in Vietnam. When the shooting stopped, four students were dead and nine wounded.

College students had been protesting the war on campuses for years, but Kent State stopped all that. On that day the message was clear: Protest, no matter how well-behaved the protesters might be, would no longer be tolerated.

I think about Kent State as I see media reports of today's protesters. Many of them gripe and moan that their rights and liberties are being infringed. I wonder what they would think if National Guard troops showed up and opened fire. I wonder if they even know what happened just 40 years ago in Kent, Ohio.