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6.1: Writing with Precision and to Your Audience

  • Page ID
    21985
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    One suggestion for promoting effective writing is to be precise. But how do you follow a suggestion like that? When should you be precise? Where? How? Unfortunately, there is no recipe to follow. About all that can be said is that you should be precise "where appropriate," but you should not be pseudoprecise. Nevertheless, after seeing an example or two below of how to be precise and comparing it with examples of failing to be precise, you will get the point.

    Here is a question that is answered precisely and then imprecisely: "How do you get to Bill's house from here?"

    RELATIVELY PRECISE Answer: Go six blocks up this street to the first traffic light. Turn right, and it will be the red house with white trim─about in the middle of the next block. It's on your left. Or maybe it's on your right; I can't remember.

    RELATIVELY IMPRECISE Answer: You can't miss it. He lives in the house next to my friend Ted. Ted lives on Braithwaite Street. Ted's is the most beautiful house on the block; Bill and Ted practice their electric guitars there in the garage every night. Keep an eye on their phone booth when you're there.

    Even though it contains the imprecise terms about and maybe, the first answer is more precise.

    Another suggestion is to write to your audience. How do you do so? Well, first you have to decide who your audience is. Don't write as if you might be read by any human being either now or in the future. That's too big an audience. For example, if you are writing a description of Theodore Roosevelt and your audience is all professional historians, you wouldn't bother to mention that he was president before that other Roosevelt, Franklin. However, if your audience is junior high school students, you would make a mistake if you failed to mention this fact about Franklin Roosevelt. When you write a college term paper, assume that your audience is your instructor. With that in mind, you do not need to make elementary points that you might need to make if your audience were your fellow students. You can assume that the instructor is aware of the topic you are writing about but may not have had the specific new ideas you have had. Only by writing for a specific audience can you answer the question "Should I argue [explain, describe] this point, or can I presume it and leave it unsaid?" In answering that question, ask yourself this: "If my audience were right here in front of me and I were talking to them, should I say this now in order to get my idea across?" There is no formula for tailoring your writing product to your audience. Good tailoring is affected by the subject matter, by the characteristics of the audience, and by the purpose of the writing. It's hard to be more precise than this.

    Part of what makes writing precise is helpful structure. The structure provides a framework. In the example of directions to Bill's house, the structure in the precise answer is a sequence of steps the reader can follow to get there. The only helpful direction offered in the imprecise answer is to go to somewhere on Braithwaite Street.

    Writing should have a specific structure, an overall plan of development, a method of organization. Although there are many acceptable structures, not everything is acceptable. Good readers can readily distinguish an ice sculpture from a puddle. Bad writing leaves these readers with a sense that the writing is all wet and messy.

    One usually effective rule of thumb is to mentally divide your own piece of writing into three parts—an introduction, a middle, and an ending. In the introduction you announce your intentions or briefly describe what you are going to say and maybe the motivation for saying it. There you usually present a sketch of your main argument to help guide the reader in what follows. In the middle you provide the details; and in the ending you summarize what you’ve said and perhaps speculate about its implications or what might follow next. This common structure can be thought of this way: you tell them what you're going to say; then you say it; then you tell them what you’ve said. This rule gets to be more important the longer the document.


    This page titled 6.1: Writing with Precision and to Your Audience is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Bradley H. Dowden.

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