🌱 assumed audiences make you a better writer
Maggie Appleton writes:
Naming your invisible audiences [frees you] from unspoken obligations
She does this by prefacing her posts:
At the beginning of many of my posts, I have a small informational box that tells you my assumed audience – who I think I’m writing this piece for.
I like the idea of stating an assumed audience at the top of a blog post. I’ve tried it on a few posts so far and I’ve found it a helpful north star while writing.
There are a million different ways to write about a topic. In my first drafts on topics, I sometimes get lost in all the different facets I could cover. Writing an “assumed audience” call-out helps ground me in what angle I care about most and gives me explicit permission to ignore everything else.
While I can’t say for sure if it benefits readers, I can point to “🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten” as evidence that it might.
🌳 how I publish my Zettelkasten is the most-viewed post on my blog by a wide-margin1. And it’s not for Zettelkasten newbies. When I first wrote that piece, my outline included the typical beginner topics around “What is a Zettelkasten” and “Why might you want one”. As a newbie myself, there was nothing new I could add to those topics. Furthermore, most of the article would be about the nuts and bolts of setting up an Obsidian-to-Github-Pages publishing pipeline. Anyone interested in “What is a Zettelkasten” are not looking to publish one of their own and vice versa. Anyone excited about what I really had to say are well-acquainted with Beatrice Webb.
Writing the “Assumed Audience” box for that piece gave me permission to dive into level 2 on the topic without worrying about providing an on-ramp. That enabled me to write a more focused piece. I dove into topics like regexes and special scripts, and that paid off for the audience.
So if your blog doesn’t already have a built-in audience profile, I recommend giving the “assumed audience” call-out a try! It’s helped me maintain focus piece-by-piece. And maybe it’ll help you too!
Info:
- Source: Assumed Audiences
- Related to:
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As of 2024-01-15, 151 views compared to the next highest 95 and the third highest of 52. So really no contest. (You can see more numbers in 🌱 2023 State of the Blog). ↩
Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.
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Updates
- : Used to be called 'list your assumed audience at the beginning of blog posts' and covered the topic briefly. With this update, I spend more time on the benefits _I've_ seen from using it.