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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.