June 1, 2011

Of the topics I read about in the past week, one of the more interesting topics to me was different techniques you could use to find out about your audience. The first step to learning about your audience is figuring out what you already know and don't know about them. After you figure that out, you could search them on the internet, interview people that you think know you’re most important readers well, and read what your readers have written. This way you have a good idea of your readers’ style of doing reading and writing. By reading your future readers documents, you can get a pretty good idea of what they would like to see in one including design, organization, level of detail and vocabulary.

This is interesting to me because I feel like these days it must be so easy to find information on people. It seems to me like it’s strange if you don't have a Facebook or a website of their own, so it's pretty easy to dig up information on people. I feel like when somebody I know isn’t easily found on the internet that it’s because they have something to hide, whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but I do know that before this class began, I typed in “Nicole Williams” into google.com just to see what would come up!