Today in class we discussed how when writing for the media, always think of the audience first. They are the people we are targeting and trying to persuade to read our message. That being said, we must understand who our audience is. Professor Jenkins gave some interesting statistics of people in America and how often they read or have issues with reading. 58% of high school graduates will not read a book for leisure after graduating. 48 % of college graduates won’t read a book for leisure after graduating. 80% of families have not purchased a book in a 1 year time frame. 70% of adults won’t finish a book to the end. And finally, 60% of people in America have an illiteracy problem.
When hearing this in class today, I wasn’t really that surprised. I find myself and a few of my friends to be an exception to these statistics, but it’s simply because we have always enjoyed reading. But I know for a fact that my fiancée never reads books unless he is required to and he typically tries to find ways out of doing it. Except if it pertains to science, politics, or Xbox related, he isn’t interested. Not to say that he doesn’t read (he loves online news sources), but he never picks up a book. What was shocking about these statistics was that the average reading level in America is only at the 5th grade.
After discussing these statistics, we moved on to the topics of how we cannot assume the audience is homogenous. That being said, we must not dumb down our message but simplify it using the audiences language. We then went on to discuss how people are lazy and we only care about two functions; reproducing and eating. Thinking this way reminds me of how we technically are all animals, just more evolved then our counterparts. That being said, we still only seek to do what will expend the least amount of energy to do anything. It makes sense.
That all being said, we than continued with the topics of how we are persuade the audience to read our message, how to penetrate the WIFM barrier. Make the message, short, sharp, limited, and appeal to our basic instincts. We have to consider their gender, culture, geographic location, age, experiences, and more.
That's why I think these reading statistics are way off. Just because we don't read books, doesn't mean we don't read. Writing can be found almost anywhere, and these statistics don't take online into account.
ReplyDelete