What is audience in communication

For running a successful business, you need to promote and sell your products to a targeted and valuable audience.

Finding out the right audience and figuring out their needs and engaging them is the right way, it the biggest challenge for any business.

Companies that are successful have properly identified their audience and attracting them to their products and services.

Audience Definition

An audience is a group of readers who read a particular piece of writing.

One should anticipate the needs or expectations of your audience in order to convey information or argue for a particular claim.

Your audience might be your instructor, classmates, the president of an organization, the staff of a management company, or any other number of possibilities.

You need to know your audience before you start writing.

Determining your Audience Type

Writers determine their audience types by considering:

• Who they are (age, sex, education, economic status, political/ social/religious beliefs);
• What level of information they have about the subject (novice, the general reader, specialist or expert);
• The context in which they will be reading a piece of writing (in a newspaper, textbook, popular magazine, specialized journal, on the Internet, and so forth).

You’ll need to analyze your audience in order to communicate effectively.

Three Types of Audience

Three types of audiences are the “lay” audience, the “managerial” audience, and the “experts.” The “lay” audience has no special or expert knowledge.

They connect with the human-interest aspect of articles.

They usually need background information; they expect more definition and description, and they may want attractive graphics or visuals.

Managerial Audience

The managerial audience may or may have more knowledge than the lay audience about the subject, but they need knowledge so they can make a decision about the issue.

Any background information, facts, statistics needed to make a decision should be highlighted.

The “experts” may be the most demanding audience in terms of knowledge, presentation, and graphics or visuals.

Experts are often “theorists” or “practitioners.”

For the “expert” audience, document formats are often elaborate and technical, style and vocabulary may be specialized or technical, source citations are reliable and up-to-date, and documentation is accurate.

Academic Audiences

Assuming you are writing a paper for a class, ask yourself who is the reader?

The most important reader is probably the instructor, even if a grader will look at the paper first. Ask yourself what you know about your teacher and his or her approach to the discipline.

Do you know, for example, if this teacher always expects papers to be carefully argued? Has this teacher emphasized the importance of summarizing cases accurately before referring to them?

Will this professor be looking for an “argument synthesis,” showing how the cases all support one point or will this professor be more interested in seeing how the cases complicate one another?

In other words, take the time to brainstorm about what you’ve learned about the teacher to help you meet his or her expectations for this paper.

You probably know more about the teacher than you think, and asking questions about how the teacher treats this material in class will help you remember those details to help you shape your paper.

Nonacademic Audiences

Nonacademic audiences read your writing for reasons other than to grade you. (Some teachers assign papers specifically asking students to write for non-academic audiences).

They will gain information from your writing.

Think about writing a newsletter or a resume: an audience read these for information, only how they use the information varies.

A nonacademic audience involves more than writing. Consider the following:

• You’ll have to determine who the audience is.
• You’ll have to think about what is an appropriate format to use.
• You’ll have to consider what is and is not an appropriate topic for your audience. (If you don’t have one already.)
• You’ll have to determine how your topic will fit the format.

Conclusion

It is vital to know your audience to tailor-made your message according to the audience; so that the message is understood by the targeted audience.

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When you communicate, your purpose is not what you want to do; instead, it is what you want your audience to do as a result of reading what you wrote or listening to what you said. Thus, it involves the audience. To communicate effectively (that is, to achieve your purpose), you must adapt to your audience. Therefore, you must know your audience.

Knowing your purpose and audience helps determine your strategy. If your purpose or audience is unclear, clarify it as best you can, possibly by asking others. For a public thesis defense, for example, the audience is usually strongly heterogeneous. It includes your jury, your colleagues, your friends, and perhaps your family. The purpose depends largely on how your institution sees the event. Some institutions feel that you must primarily address the jury, no matter who else is in the room, as it is your only chance to convince them of your worth. Other institutions see the defense as a way to broaden the visibility of your work and will want you to address a larger audience — including the jury.

Readers and listeners vary in how much they know about the topic you discuss and about your broader scientific field. Specialists will likely want more detail. They can apply detailed information in their own work, or they might need it to be convinced of the validity of your conclusions. Nonspecialists, on the other hand, need more basic information, especially in the introduction. Nonspecialists also require more interpretation, typically with the conclusions. They also need simpler vocabulary (or definitions), as they have not mastered the technical terms of your field.

Specialism is relative. Any audience can be seen as including both more specialized and less specialized members, all the more so when it is ill defined. Even a scientific paper published in a journal, which you can see as a specialized publication, will likely be read by newcomers to the field who are less specialized. Even referees on the program committee of a conference cannot have an equal degree of expertise in all the proposals they must evaluate. In other words, do not assume that a scientific audience is necessarily composed of "people like you." On the contrary, you may well be the most specialized person on the planet in your specific topic. Effective scientific communication, and in particular effective writing, strives not to exclude readers or listeners. A well-written scientific paper makes sense, at least in its broad lines, to anyone with a scientific background.

Readers might also vary in how familiar they are with the context. When you are writing a document (for example, a letter) to a single person or to a small, well-defined group of people, you might be tempted to jump directly to the heart of the matter, assuming context is unnecessary. This person or group of people, who are your primary readers, may indeed know the context. Still, they may not be mindful of it when they read your document. Moreover, your document might end up being read by people you did not identify, such as those who were forwarded your document by a primary reader or perhaps those who will obtain your document in the future. These people, who are your secondary readers, will not know or remember the context. An effective document makes sense to both primary and secondary readers.