Knowing your audience

Over the last few weeks we have gone through a variety of readings. Unsurprisingly our class enjoyed the Bill Bryson readings the most. His work was well written and humorous to read. Even when talking about scientists who changed the world, he portrayed them as real people with real emotions (not as beings of perfections as most science texts are prone to do). The other readings were not as enjoyable though. Some, simply because they weren’t meant to be read by us (eg. the article from the physics journal) . The authors targeted different audiences and the material often went over our heads. For the other articles, such as “The Sobel Effect” and “Leviathan and the Air Pump” the quality of writing was just bad. Evidence of this pertains from the fact that my readings of these texts were characterized by frequent naps in between.

Thus when it comes to writing about science and technology, one must have a firm understanding of who one’s audience is. We see that Bill Bryson appears to have done this perfectly. Being a layman he has written for the laymen, and written very well on top of that. The author of the physics article was originally writing for a journal. His article describing the quantum effects of electrons, was never written to be understood by us. Since we as a class, are writing mainly for our peers and fellow Georgia Tech students, we must keep our work interesting, characterized with good quality writing. The material we cover should not be too complex but can be above the average person’s comprehensive ability. This is TECH after all.