Discussion: Do You Know Your Audience?

For technical documentation, it's best to set a minimum expected level, but for dramatic writing, I think that maximum better.

It's a difficult balance to achieve. You don't want to insult your audience with exposition. But you don't want to lose them completely either. For example, this kind of dialog makes excessive use of exposition:

[Ops]

WORF: Where are they? They should've been back hours
  ago. 
O'BRIEN: Maybe the meeting with Starfleet Command took
  longer than they thought it would. 
KIRA: Then why haven't Sisko or Dax contacted us? 

The above dialog is written specifically to get the audience up to speed. It's a pretty unnatural interaction, but it saves time.

On the other hand, I think the show Better Call Saul achieves the proper level of this type of writing rather well. But I've heard people describe the show as "slow." I don't think so, but this is probably an artifact of the writers avoiding lazy exposition. And if that's true, I think it's a good call.

Knowing your audience is not easy. Some readers don't mind walls of text. Some can't tolerate long-winded rants.

Your audience might prefer videos instead of an article. They might routinely skip the article and go straight to the comments.

On top of that, your audience might arrive because your article came up from a search engine query.

So how can you ever really know your audience?

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Also see:

• Film Theory: He is LYING! | Better Call Saul's Phony Disorder
• Review - Battlestar Galactica: 33
• Heroes :: Writing Cheats