Audience & Purpose Handout
Brandi Morley and C. Anneke Snyder
Overview
- This handout is adapted from “Audience and Purpose [Lesson]” by Brandi Morley.
- This handout complements lessons on audience and purpose in writing. It offers questions and examples to help students grasp how understanding their audience and purpose shapes a piece’s content, tone, and structure.
Handout
Why Know Your Audience and Purpose?
- Informed Decision-Making
- Understanding your audience and purpose helps you:
- Decide what information to include.
- Choose an appropriate tone.
- Determine how to organize content.
- Understanding your audience and purpose helps you:
- Questions to Consider. When deciding what details to include and what tone to use, ask yourself the below questions. Consider, for example, how your answers (and thus your tone and information) to these questions would change if you were discussing solar power with a child vs. a physics professor.
- Audience Knowledge:
- What does your audience already know about the topic?
- What background information is essential for their understanding?
- Audience Influences:
- What might shape their position or feelings about the topic?
- What outcome do you expect from communicating with them?
- Audience Knowledge:
- Structuring Your Writing. It’s important to determine your purpose for writing, as each purpose requires specific strategies (and, thus, organizational structure). Ask yourself “Why am I communicating?”
- Purpose-Driven Choices:
- To explain: Provide clarity.
- To persuade: Influence opinions.
- To inform: Share knowledge.
- To describe: Paint a vivid picture.
- To entertain: Engage and captivate.
- To analyze: Break down and examine.
- To evaluate: Assess and judge.
- Purpose-Driven Choices:
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Attribution:
Morley, Brandi and C. Anneke Snyder. “Audience and Purpose Handout.” Strategies, Skills and Models for Student Success in Writing and Reading Comprehension. College Station: Texas A&M University, 2024. This work is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).