I’ve stopped asking people to define their purpose in writing.
As you probably know, the first steps in writing are to define your audience and your purpose.
When I am coaching writers or revising their work, I first ask, “Who is your audience?” I often ask follow-up questions to help them narrow the audience down, because they usually start too broadly.
Now we’re up to the second vital question: “What is your purpose in writing?”
But I never ask it that way anymore. The answers I used to get hardly ever made reference to the question we just spent 10 minutes answering. Writers usually defined their purposes in terms of what they wanted to say rather than what they wanted their audience to hear.
Fair enough. I asked the question wrong.
Now I ask: “What do you want this piece to accomplish?”
This question shifts the focus from the writer to the reader. It assumes that the goal of any piece of writing is to have some effect on the audience.
Then, to make the concept even easier, I phrase it as a multiple-choice question: “After they’ve read it, what do you want your audience to know, believe, or do?” This second question forces writers to consider precisely what effect they want to have.
- Know. Knowledge goals are appropriate when you want only to convey information. A knowledge goal might be appropriate for a research report, for example, or a journal article.
- Believe. Belief goals arise when you want to persuade people to change their minds about an issue. You would choose a belief goal for an op-ed piece or a speech about voting rights.
- Do. Action goals are by far the most common. A “do” goal, like a “believe” goal, means that you are writing a persuasive piece. You want readers to do something when they finish reading it.
A given piece may have more than one kind of goal. People often focus on knowledge goals, though, when what they really want is action.
Jan: What do you want to accomplish with this webpage? What do you want people to know, believe, or do?
Writer: I want my audience to know that children in the foster care system need someone to advocate for them.
J: Why do they need to know that?
W: Because our kids need help! [Gives passionate description of the plight of the children and what happens when they don’t have an advocate.]
J: Of course. But if I know that kids in foster care are in trouble, how does that help them?
W: Because then we hope you’ll volunteer with our organization!
Knowledge goals and belief goals usually are steps toward an action goal. Instructions about how to register for the event or statistics about the lack of afterschool care in your community do indeed provide information. But the reason you provide that information is to entice people to register for the event or write their representatives.
Once you know that your purpose is to persuade, not just inform, you will present the information differently. A dry recitation of facts won’t cut it.
To be sure, you want people to know about the desperate need. But the knowledge must be presented in heartfelt terms so readers will believe that something must be done – and that they are the ones to do it. When you get to that point, all that’s left is to tell your audience exactly what to do and how to do it.
Yes, all that is easier said than done. Call on me. I can not only help you define the goal but also develop copy that will accomplish it.