Chapter 5: Understanding Context, Purpose & Audience
Chapter Summary
Key Takeaways
- Three elements should shape your writing content: purpose, audience and tone.
- Audiences respond better to plain, inclusive language.
- When writing something critical, it is important to understanding limits of your argument and your own biases.
Activities for Further Learning
- Think about an assignment that you’ve created recently. Then, look online to try to see how other people have delivered a similar message in a different genre. How does the genre impact the message? What’s left out and what’s included? Does it appeal to a different audience? Write a paragraph or two about your findings.
- Write a critical paragraph about something you have big opinions about. Be sure to follow the criteria for writing critically.
Attribution
This chapter is an adaptation of Chapter 5.2 “Think, then write: Writing preparation”in Business Communication for Success and is used under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license. It also contains material from Introduction to Professional Communications is (c) 2018 by Melissa Ashman and is licensed under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
This chapter is also an adaptation of Audience Analysis: Just Who Are These Guys” by David McMurrey, which is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
