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To find out who the audience is for a certain text try answering the following questions:

• Who is the text aimed at?
• Can you work out what age group they are from the language or layout?
• Are they people who are interested in a specific topic?

The audience for a local newspaper is very different from a national music magazine, for example. Writers tailor their texts to their audience carefully. They consider them in how they write sentences, what vocabulary they use and the style of their writing.

Any contextual information you have about a text may give you some clues to its audience. You can also work out who it is aimed at by looking at:

• The topic – is it about something of particular interest to a group?
• The tone – is it chatty or formal?
• The words – does it use specialist vocabulary, or easy words, or polysyllabic vocabulary?
• Does it use Standard English or dialect?
• Does it use ‘you’ and if so, what kind of characteristics does that ‘you’ seem to have?
• Is the layout changed for the audience and purpose? For example, does it use more grown-up colours and a layout that you would expect from a text for adults?

Example

Here is an example text from the C����ý website. How can you tell the purpose of the text and the intended audience?

Analysis

The purpose of the text is to inform, and the intended audience is children. This is clear because:

• The layout of the page has a fun, colourful theme with plenty of visual images to go with the content of the article.
• The language is imperative, and the order of the texts is numbered into a step-by-step guide to show that the article is to instruct the reader to do something.
• The language is informal, using exclamation marks to show that it is trying to create a fun tone for the reader as they create the task ‘Shiny silver works really well for a disco ball!’