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Archive | Audience: how to write for your reader

While we writers write in isolation—session after session, alone in our writing rooms, when we show up at our computer screen and produce text, usually for most of us, this writing has an intended reading audience in mind, a group of people we want—and often need—to communicate with.

Writing memoir almost always implies a reading audience.

Whether we are writing for our children and grandchildren or for a whole class of unknown people out in the world, most of us have someone—a type of reading audience—in mind. Ultimately writing is a communication between a writer and readers.

If we think about it even a little bit, we will realize this audience is not likely to be the whole world. Instead it will be an appreciative group that is waiting for our memoir—even if its members do not yet know it.

Writing for a reading audience implies a dialog.

That we are writing for a reading audience implies that we are engaged in a dialog. Sometimes that dialog comes as a letter or an enote from a reader. Other times, it is expressed in a review on an online bookseller’s site.

All dialogs can be enhanced though attention to both the content and to the delivery. These can be learned with the mastery of literary techniques, discussions of which are ever present on this blog.

Learning how to write more engagingly to your reading audience can only benefit your ability to communicate.

In conclusion

These blog posts are one source of learning the craft of becoming a better writer by addressing your reading audience more effectively.

[To see a video that offers you four easy-to-implement tips to help your story to appeal to a broader public, click here.]

sharing your memoir

How to Get the Most Out of Sharing Your Memoir In-Progress

A critical step for a brand-new writer is sharing your memoir in progress with others. There is nothing like a reader to help you develop a healthy critical sense of your work. This article is especially for the writer who cringes at the thought of sharing his/her writing. Those others you will share with might […]

audience in mind

Should You Write With An Audience in Mind?

While some people decide to write a memoir according to structure—healing memoirs, investigative memoirs, etc—as I wrote in a previous post, others write with an audience in mind. (Writing with structure in mind often calls for writing with audience in mind, also.) Sometimes the audience is of specific people but many other writers, while they […]

memoir writing information

How to Have a Successful Book Reading–Author Book Reading Tips

You can have a great book reading by following several guidelines. I would call them best practices of doing a public reading of your memoir. They are now somewhat natural for me now but they were originally studied and rehearsed. You may know some of them intuitively and others you can learn. (more…)