It is true that you cannot please everybody. The same is true when writing, you can never really write for everyone. To effectively write, you need to plan who will be your audience, so you can better address their wants and needs.
So before anything else, let us learn what an audience is through this phrase from Study.com:
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we know that we must modify what we say and how we say it according to who our audience is. We might say, ‘Look at that silly doggie!’ if our audience is a 2-year-old, but we wouldn’t say that to our teenager. We might say, ‘We’re having pork for dinner,’ to our spouse, but we wouldn’t say that to our boss. Our content, tone and language changes according to what we know about our audience.
In writing, the audience is who you are writing for. If you know who you are writing for, you can make good decisions about what information to include, as well as your tone and language in conveying it.
Let us also take a look at what Aims.edu has to say about the importance of determining an audience:
Knowing the audience for a particular essay is important because it determines the content that will appear in the writing. The content of an essay that has a specific topic will vary depending on the intended audience. In other words, having a focused topic is important, but having a specific audience is equally important.
For example, let’s say you are writing an expository (informative) essay on the most important practice techniques in becoming a better tennis player. If your audience is beginning tennis players, or players who know little about the game, the techniques needed to get better are different than if you are writing to intermediate players who want to become good enough to enter and/or win tournaments.
In the first example, the steps would be more basic, while in the second example they would obviously be more advanced. Either way, the topic of the essay, becoming a better tennis player, is the same, but because the audiences are different, the information in each essay will be different as well.
Now that you know what an audience is and why it is important to know them before writing, now should be the perfect time to learn how to write for your audience.
1. The first thing to realize when writing is your relationship with your audience. Are you friends with them or do you share the same experience that they have? Or are you an expert on the subject? If you are an authority in the subject then you should make a tone that is authoritative and instructive.
2. You should also understand how informed your readers are in the subject that you are saying. As you see, not all who reads are there to acquire new information because there are those who simply want to explore new ideas. So, if you are going to present yourself as an authority on the subject then you may want to use the right jargon. Always consider the information to include when writing.
3. Furthermore, you may want to consider whether the audience will agree or disagree on what you have to say. This is the most common point that is missed by writers. Many would think that writing is all about saying what they have in mind when in fact; writing should be done in a way that it will be appealing to the audience. There will be times, however, when you will be writing a topic where the audience may have their personal opinions already. If this is the case, then you should communicate in such a way that they will see that a change of opinion is necessary. Avoid telling them that their opinion is wrong.