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grammar and writing tutorial lessons

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Objective versus subjective writing

Completely objective

Dont use the first person

Write from a general persons perspective

Superficially objective

Presentation order

Subjective writing

Think about your audience

Two types of audience

Audience knowledge

Laypeople

Getting the message across to laypeople

Analogies

Managers

Experts

Hostile or friendly

Unknown audiences

What does the audience want

Hostile or friendly?

Think about whether your audience is going to be hostile, or friendly and receptive to your writing. Say you are writing to a construction company to try to stop them building a freeway through your suburb. If the construction goes ahead, the company is going to get a large payment, and they’ll be able to keep their workers busy and paid. This means they will probably be a hostile audience - they’ve got every reason to go ahead, and you’re saying that they shouldn’t.

If you’ve got a hostile audience, then you know that you need to provide enough evidence and argument to swing them around to your point of view. Knowing is better than not knowing - if you just blindly write something assuming that most people share the same opinion as you, you may be in for a rude shock.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Unknown audiences