Persuasion: Reader-Centered Writing

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If you have ever worked to convince a friend to see a particular movie, talk your boss into giving you the day off, or wrangle an extension on an assignment from a professor—and won on all counts—then you know very well what it means to be persuasive.

You have to know your audience and understand what tone to use with them, make your purpose clear,  and gather and present convincing evidence.

Audience

Audience is the fulcrum upon which every other component in professional writing balances. Should your ability to reach your audience fail, go awry, be less than successful, then you might as well apply those same descriptors to the document you have produced. It will fail, go awry, be less than successful.

That’s why it helps to begin our understanding of audience by referring to professional  writing as audience- or reader-centered. You need to keep that principle in mind whenever you produce any professional  writing document.

What is Reader-Centered Writing?

Writing that is reader-centered considers on every level — from content  to organization, paragraph length to sentence structures, page layout to font choice — the needs, demands, likes, and even prejudices of its audience. To produce truly reader-centered writing, you must ensure that your writing does several things simultaneously. You must:

  • Consider the readers’ needs with regard to content: what you tell them and what you don’t need to tell them because they already know,
  • Anticipate their response to the topic or subject of your writing, which will guide how you organize your document,
  • Predetermine, based upon the audience’s preferences, what sort of visual arrangement the document will take with regard to paper, color, font, and other design choices, and
  • Very, very carefully think about every single word used in the document, every single arrangement of words into a sentence, so that you are adopting a tone that is reader-friendly, not combative or accusatory or mean or all-knowing and superior.

And that’s not all. Each one of these principles — which will be discussed over the next few pages and chapters — has multiple facets. For example, did you know that even the choice of a font (a visual element) can reflect a particular tone? And that the use of the word multitudinous instead of many can make you sound haughty and “above” your reader?

It’s easy enough to say that your writing should be reader-centered, but how do you accomplish that task?

Create Reader-Centered Writing

Your choices regarding the above principles rely on a single element: your understanding of your audience, which can be made up of just a few individuals — or thousands.

While it might seem kind of silly at first, when you are producing a professional  writing document, you should think about several key questions regarding this audience.

What are their

  • ages?
  • sexes?
  • ethnicities?
  • nationalities?
  • financial statuses?
  • political leanings?
  • educational levels?

Is it possible to identify every single member of your audience in this way? No, it isn’t. And what happens if you have a very mixed audience? You have to shoot for a middle ground. 

As you ponder how to reach your audience, considerhow products are marketed for particular consumers. Magazines provide a perfect example of marketing strategies in action. How, for example, does the reader of National Geographic or Martha Stewart Living differ from the reader of Maxim or Car & Driver? Does Martha Stewart Living share the same readership as Maxim? How would each magazine reach its readership?

You must consider your audience. In fact, it should be your #1 priority. What does your audience want? Need? Like? Dislike? Expect? Demand? If you can’t answer those questions — if you don’t even think about them — then the document you are producing will not succeed.

Once you have identified your audience, you should attempt to create common ground with them. If you can convince them that you have their best interests in mind, that ground will be more secure.

Emphasize Benefits for Your Readers

One of the easiest ways to reach your audience is to prove that what you are attempting to persuade them of will help them achieve their own goals and meet their own needs. In other words, you need to determine  and emphasize how your idea will benefit them.

This tactic works effectively with a group. All organizations (companies, schools, clubs) have goals, so you must show how what you’re proposing will help that organization achieve their goals. Create specific sentences that make the connection (benefits in bold):

Adopting a web-based drop-add system will reduce user complaints and increase user satisfaction, thereby improving the perception students have of the university’s willingness to meet their needs.

But the technique works just as well with single readers. People are motivated by growth needs, desires for recognition, good relationships at work, a sense of achievement, personal development, and enjoyment of work itself. Show how what you’re proposing will let the reader accomplish one or more of these personal goals. Create specific sentences that make the connection:

Because of the great strides you have already made in upgrading the grammar programs available to students in the writing center, we would very much like to work directly with you while we create this new internet-based program.

By emphasizing the ways in which what you propose benefits your audience, you will assure them that you have their goals and desires first in mind. As noted earlier, audience goes hand in hand with the concepts of purpose, tone, and evidence. The next section deals with how to reveal and achieve the purpose of your document.