The Mindset: Purpose and Audience

Art for art's sake and papers for grades' sake both have their places, but in preparing a piece for publication, you need to consider your purpose and your audience.

Your Manuscript

Regardless what you’ve written—research paper, short story, novel, song lyrics, poetry—there comes a point where you finally feel that it’s done. All your hard work has paid off as you can sigh with relief, get it off your shoulders, and call it complete—or at least "good enough." (Sometimes, that sigh comes half-hopefully as you hurry to turn in that research paper that was due this morning.)

However, the difference between what you call complete and what a publisher calls complete includes a series of factors, such as appeal to the readership, alignment with certain goals, and appropriateness for the market. To many writers, it is a shock to realize that their "finished" manuscript, in the eyes of a potential publisher, really isn’t finished at all. Understanding that—and understanding what extra touches can bring on that finishing polish—will help you to feel more confident in submitting your piece and to have more success in getting it published.

Your Purpose

Magazines craft mission statements, book publishers espouse ideals, and other groups set their own goals all to know what it is they’re about and how it is they’ll go about it. Your piece needs to match that mission in order to be considered for publication. Before matching any other group’s mission, though, your piece needs to match your own.

“I wrote this for a grade” is not an acceptable purpose when you submit for publication. Your manuscript needs to have a guiding objective. Its purpose could be to inform, to reveal a new development in your field, to entertain, to expose a flaw, to recreate life, or to demonstrate the effects of feminism or power or language or ethics or even just story on a given culture or community or individual or collective. Your purpose is what you want your readers to take away when they set the manuscript down.

And if the purpose of your research paper initially was just to write for a grade, think about how you could use that information to more effectively inform—and then figure out who needs that information.

Your Audience

With your purpose well in hand, it’s time to tailor that purpose to who specifically needs it. To continue the research paper example, you may have your capstone piece, say, that examines family dynamics surrounding conversations at dinnertime. It’s fascinating to you and to your professor, but what about the world at large?

Twenty or thirty pages of information is a lot for a magazine to swallow—but a parenting magazine might be interested if you can make it fit. Your purpose is to inform but your audience doesn’t want more than three pages of information, so you pick out the juiciest parts and slap on a story or two—now you fit your audience. Or maybe you do want your audience to stay in the scholarly realm; in that case, you revise to make the piece fit the scholarly conversation.

Whatever your purpose, you can make it fit your audience; but to get published, you need to know who your audience is. Ask yourself: Who would want to read this? Who could this information or story benefit? Who is most likely to get excited about this piece and run to share it with a friend—and if the answer really is “my mother,” what is it about your mother’s interest that you can use to good effect in you writing?

Two Types of Writers

As you work with your purpose and your audience, remember that there are two types of writers: there are writers who write and there are people who write. The writers who write are the types that carry pens wherever they go, wear berets, attend writing workshops, and dream of changing the world and living in a purpose house in New Mexico.

But those aren’t the only writers out there—and, in fact, they aren’t the only successful writers. Many successful writers are people in other fields, such as politics, engineering, mathematics, medicine, education, the sciences, and marriage, family, and human development. What makes these people writers is that when they have to write, they think in terms of their purpose and their audience. Instead of cranking out a paper for a grade or to please a department chair, they write to get published. That’s the key—if you write to get published, you will.