2 Essential Tools for Planning Your Writing (Video)

Hello, this is Seth from SethPerler.com, and I’m here to tell you about audience and purpose.

So hello, my author friends and students who are learning to write.

Whenever you start a paper—it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or nonfiction—whenever you start a paper, there are certain things you want to do to make sure you have the right foundation. Otherwise, your paper is not going to be effective.

You may get an A on the paper, and I don’t care about grades. I do not care. What I care about is that you are a human being who has important things to tell. And if your paper stinks and you know you just played the game and got an A, that doesn’t impress me at all.

What impresses me is if you start building these things in and you can tell your stories effectively. I don’t care if you get an F if you actually told your story effectively and grew as an author. That’s what I care about.

You may not think of yourself as an author, but you are. You can tell your story. I don’t care if you feel like a horrible writer—lots of people feel like that. It doesn’t matter. This is an art to be developed. I’m going to teach you some things right now.

When you are starting to write, whether it’s nonfiction or fiction, you want to use the writing process. When you begin writing, one of the first things you do is plan your writing. That’s also called prewriting.

Prewriting or planning might include brainstorming, idea generation, talking to people about your ideas, making an outline, or making “buckets” for the parts of your paper. Planning is very important. People often don’t spend enough time on it, and then their paper goes in a million different directions.

It’s the number one thing people neglect, and the number one most important part of the writing process. It is the first part of the writing process.

So when you’re writing a paper, you want to plan it. And when you plan, you’re going to make buckets.

A bucket represents a paragraph—maybe an introduction, a conclusion, a body paragraph, or a chapter, whatever it is. A bucket contains ideas that go together.

A lot of people’s writing goes in a million different directions. You don’t want that. You want your ideas organized into containers so the reader can understand and digest what you’re really trying to say.

Now, when you are planning your paper, there are two very, very important things all writers need to consider before they start writing. Some people do this naturally, some people need to think carefully about it.

Those two things are audience and purpose.

First, audience.

You need to think about who you are speaking to. If you’re writing a paper for a teacher, your audience is the teacher. But even then, you might also be writing for peers your age, or maybe for 40-year-olds interested in water skiing, or teenagers interested in rock and roll, or elementary students who want to learn an instrument.

Whatever your audience is, you need to think carefully about who these people are.

My suggestion is to actually write it out—be thorough. Just brain-dump it in a paragraph or bullet points. Who are you talking to?

One audience will usually be the most important. When you write, imagine you are speaking directly to that person or type of person. Picture them while you write.

The more clearly you focus on one audience, the better your paper will be on every level.

So number one: you must clearly know who your audience is.

Number two: purpose.

You also have to clearly know the purpose of your paper. Students often don’t take the time to identify this. Their teacher tells them the purpose, or they assume they already know it.

But you need to figure it out yourself: what is your purpose?

What do you want the reader to do, think, or become? What effect do you want your writing to have?

That is your purpose.

For example, here’s a book: Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. The author’s audience was likely parents, maybe teachers and others interested in understanding teenagers.

The purpose was to teach about the teenage brain—to educate the reader.

Your purpose might be to inform, entertain, make someone laugh, change their mind, inspire action, or help them behave differently or improve themselves.

You need to be clear about why you are writing.

You have an audience you want to affect, and your purpose is how you want to affect them.

So there you go.

This is part of your planning stage. You need to clearly understand your audience and your purpose before you start building your “buckets,” which become your paragraphs or sections.

Get this clear before you start writing.

I hope you have an awesome day. I’ll see you soon. Take care.