Choosing and narrowing a topic for your assignment requires a serious effort and time investment, irrespective if your degree program. However, once you are successfully done with the task, the work is not finished. Now you need to start thinking about your writing situation.
Although thinking about the writing situations calls for determining the purpose, understanding the audience, considering the point of views, genre, and medium. As for this discussion, we will talk about the first two.
Determining your essay
A well-thought and crafted assignment has a clear purpose and goal. Here are the three core purposes that students need to examine.
- Expressing yourself. Narrating the writer’s emotions, for example, regarding a traffic accident that he/she observed.
- Informing the readers. Informing the audience regarding the core reasons why traffic incidents happen.
- Persuading the readers. Trying to convince the audience to understand and equip themselves with the safety precautions while driving.
In order to determine the purpose of your assignment, ask yourself: Why am I writing this paper? What things I want to achieve with my writing?
Do remember that some academic papers can come with more than a single purpose. A paper on fitness workout is both persuasive and informative. You can explain the anatomical changes a body experiences after a workout and convince the readers that hitting the gym is beneficial for their health.
Considering your audience
Considering the real audience is something not many students acknowledge as important. Various aspects of your assignment such as, the way you convey yourself, the word choice opted, the evidences and supporting details incorporated, the sentence structuring used, and your overall attitude and tone towards the topic depend on the type of audience.
The tone is particularly important for your readers. If you want to tempt your audience and connect with them emotionally, your tone needs to present the content in a way that interests them in an understandable and convenient manner.
Consider explaining a student orientation session to a family member or a friend. Here you will use a casual language with shorter sentences and friendly tone. For example,
“Remember we talked about how amped I am about joining college? Guess what, I attended the student orientation last week, and it was way better than I thought…”
On the other hand, when you will be talking about the same session in a student publication piece, your language will be more formal, employing longer sentences with a serious, sober tone. For example,
“College student orientations are often perceived as pompous sessions where interested students tend to connect with rather unresponsive teachers. However, I am quite pleased to express that the orientation session I attended last week was a great success and quite productive unlike heard before.”
How to consider your audience?
During the process of defining your audience, keep the following pointers in mind:
- You readers are not at your place and cannot observe or participate in the content you are writing. Consider you are writing about a local landscaping service, the reader cannot visualize the types of services given unless you explain in detail.
- Never expect the readers to know the things you know at subliminal level. The readers might not possess the same subject expertise, experience, or insights you are familiar with. Hence, you need to define the technical jargons and industry-specific terms used.
- Your audience might not affirm with your opinion and values. If you are writing a paper on parenting skills and argue that strict discipline is not the solution for perfect parenting, there is a chance not everyone will agree with your ideas and claims.
- Your readers might not respond in a similar way to yours in different situations. Consider writing a review on Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street. See here wallstreet.edu.au . You must have found the humor in the movie funny, but the case might be the same with other watchers.
When we talk about college and university level assignment papers, apparently, your only audience is your teacher. Although teachers often ask students to consider their audience as certain group of people reading a specific magazine, newspaper, etc., but you can holistically assume that your audience is your teacher.
It is better to consider the writing situation as if your teacher is unfamiliar with the topic. This is why you are required to provide ample background information, definitions of technical terms, and other details that gives the reader a positive head start in reading the rest of your work.