Audience and Purpose

For any written work, it is important to identify who your audience is, meaning who will be the reader of your writing. Knowing your audience will help you make choices for the purpose of your letter and how you write the letter. For the researched open letter, you will identify multiple audiences.

• Direct Audience: The direct audience is the specific audience you are addressing the “letter” to. This should be any individual or group whom you want to take action on your problem (someone with both the power to effect the proposed change and likely to care about your letter).
• Indirect audience. As a letter that is “open” or available to the public (as opposed to a personal email or an old-fashioned snail mail letter), consider that you are speaking broadly to a general audience who may also be impacted by the problem or who cares about the problem.

For more information about how to identify and address an audience, read ”Audience” from The Writing Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.