Postcards from the Funny Farm

Aristotle and Plato wrote of the importance of the audience in rhetoric.  If you want to communicate something, you ought to consider the receiver.

In writing a college essay, the audience is clear: the professor.  In writing for a magazine, you have a focused idea of the demographic you are appealing to.  Most every writing situation has an audience you can imagine, outline, and write with respect to . . .

Not so the blog.

Writing a blog can be like a diary.  Looking around at blogs through Technorati and some interesting keywords, I have found MANY blogs of this nature at Live Journal.  That makes sense, it’s called a Journal, so no bad there.  But blogging can be a wide array of other types of writing.  The blogosphere contains diary blogs and blogs about bands and blogs about (insert blogs you know here).  Blogging, like all writing, will benefit when the blogger considers her/his audience when composing.  I’ll give you a few ways that good writers can do do that:

#1.  Take the time to think about your audience.  This will depend on your purpose and subject of your post.

#2.  Outline the typical reader in this audience, then form your words around that person.

#3. Use their vernacular.  We live in an exciting culture full of sub-culture phrases and idioms.  Write a couple down before you start and use these in your post.

#4. Guess some questions the reader might have and answer them in your post.

Just thinking about your audience will make your blog (ironically) universally more coherent and effective at persuasion. And if you are thinking “I don’t write to persuade.” Then I must respectfully reply to you: “All writing is persuasion, just ask old Plato and Aristotle.”  That’s my 2 cents on that.