Ryan Lopano Blog

When going through different articles, you can definitly seem a divide between the people who are actual writers and people who aren’t. Even as someone who doesn’t consider himself a writer, it still seems pretty clear who knows their stuff. A big part of this is who the writing is actually targeted to. I find that more experienced writers tend to gear their articles towards the reader themselves. I compare this to less experienced writers who sometimes lack detail and don’t give context to their articles.

Someone who doesn’t agree with my philosophy is William Zinsser. He talks about how important it is to write for yourself. He specifically says, “There is no such audience; every reader is a different person,” in Chapter 5. I don’t fully disagree with this, but I do find more value in writing towards the writer. I think it leads to a better overall experience.

Going deeper into Zinsser’s philosophy, he talks about how “Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.” I definitely understand what he is getting at. I think a good analogy to this is when people say they have trouble picking something to watch on Netflix or other streaming services due to there being so many options. I believe Zinsser would think that would be the same thing when it comes to writing. It is difficult to pick an article with the number of options that are out there. In addition, the audience isn’t experts and doesn’t truly know what they want.

I feel like this brings me back to my point of the difference between writing for your audience versus yourself. When you are writing to a smaller audience or to yourself, you leave out details and don’t need to deal with people “not knowing what they want.” This definitely isn’t the case when you expand the audience. In addition to an increase in audience, you increase the reach. With this, you need to adjust your writing to match and fit what is expected.