Audience:

As a writer, you need to think about who your audience is going to be. Who is going to read what you have written. A piece of writing written for one type of audience might be inappropriate or uninteresting for another type. For instance a letter you have written to a friend will probably be written in a different style than a letter written to your mother or father.

Therefore, if possible, you need to know something about readers, their age, their sex, their race, their nationality, their habitat, their type of work, their political beliefs, their religious beliefs, etc. While it is not always probable or possible to know all of these characteristics or even some of them, it is helpful to know as many as possible or at least to think about them.

As well as thinking about whom your audience is, you also need to think about the purpose of your writing assignment. Are you writing to persuade, to define, to recall, to inform to analyze, etc.? The purpose of your writing will also affect how you write.

Point of View:

Another thing to keep in mind when you are writing is the point of view from which you will be writing. Most or all of your writing for this class will be from the first person point of view which means you will be the narrator and will be writing from your perspective only. In first person point of view, you use the pronouns "I," "me," "us," "we," or "our." Another point of view that is often used in academic writing is third person, which talks from the perspective of an outsider or someone not involved in what is being talked about. Third person point of view uses nouns and pronouns such as "people," "society," "one," "he," "she," "it," "they," "them," "their," etc.

Be sure you keep a consistent point of view in your writing. If you decide to write from your own point of view, tell everything from your own perspective. If you decide to write in third point of view, tell everything from an outsider's perspective.

NOTE: Do NOT write using second person "you" or "your" unless it is in dialogue or direct quotations.