September 8, 2026
During a normal week, I can write for very different people. I may prepare instructions for someone learning Excel, send an email to a professional contact, work on a YouTube video, prepare social media content, and then sit down to write an assignment for college.
I cannot communicate with all of those people in exactly the same way.
I actually learned this through work before I started thinking about it as “audience awareness.” There were times when I wrote something that made perfect sense to me and later realized I had assumed that the reader already knew part of the story. That is an easy mistake to make when I know the subject well.
A student and a client are reading for different reasons
When I prepare training material, I want someone to be able to use it while working. If I am explaining an Excel process, the learner needs to understand what to do next. Filling the page with technical language might show that I know the software, but it does not necessarily help the person using the document.
A professional email creates another situation. The person reading it may have many other messages waiting. Usually, I need to make the purpose clear fairly quickly and give enough information for that person to respond or make a decision.
Creating online content taught me something else. A viewer does not owe me their attention simply because I spent hours making a video. They can leave after a few seconds. That affects the way I think about a title, a thumbnail, an introduction, and even the order in which I present information.
One mistake I still make
Sometimes I want to explain the background before getting to the useful part because the background feels important to me. Then I read what I wrote and notice how long it takes to reach the actual point.
I still catch myself doing this.
The reader, however, comes with a reason for reading. A student may need an answer. A client may need a decision. Someone watching a tutorial may have a problem they want to solve. Thinking about that reason changes what I keep, what I remove, and what I put first.
I ask who will receive the message, what they probably already know, and what could confuse them. I do not always write those questions down, but when I ignore them completely, I usually notice the difference later.
For me, knowing the audience now starts before the first sentence.
Good writing can look surprisingly simple when it is finished. The reader never sees all the sentences I removed or changed. They simply understand what I wanted to say.
