Walking and Talking about 'Your Audience' in Breukelen

Thank you to all those who walked and talked with us in Breukelen on Friday.

With beatiful weather and in 27°C we walked through the Dutch 'polderlandschap' and past cows and windmills. 

Meanwhile, we addressed the following questions:

Who do you write for? 

What is the audience you hope for; what is the audience you may expect? How does that all that relate to writing in English; to the venues where you publish; to the style you adopt? 

And how does it affect what you tell or leave untold? How does it emerge in questions and your argument, plot, story line (or how would you call the line in your writing)? 

What are you doing, technically, practically, to include The Reader in your work? How do you seduce, appeal to, convince, or otherwise reach out to the audience that you imagine?

This resulted in fruitful conversations about how audiences differ, which different styles of writing and varying degrees of explanations they require, how combining audiences may improve texts or make them illegible to some, and/or boring for others. We discussed how writing for an audience in your mother tongue may add new insights to your argument usually written in English. How 'intranslatables' may enrich your understanding of your object of research. We wondered why we read texts unrelated to our research topics and what they may offer us - and exchanged thoughts on how we may learn something from every text. 

Thank you for joining and if you did not, we hope to see you next month!