Engaging your Audience – Part One – The Conflict

Engaging your Audience – Part One – The Conflict

Audiences are fickle. Students and readers have infinite opportunities for entertaining and meaningless distraction. The question for a teacher or a writer becomes: How do I get them to pay attention to my material?

Teachers have a slight advantage. Even though the audience is divided into smaller chunks, students are placed in your care and told to listen to you. That doesn’t mean they have to like it, but the audience is there nonetheless. Teachers have an authority and an opportunity that writers don’t have when they are starting out.

When it comes to finding and engaging an audience, writers have a challenge similar to street performers in New York City. Thousands of people could stop and watch you at any given moment, but they are all busily hurrying along with their own plans. Writers need to make themselves an authority or at least someone worth watching for a few minutes.

Although there are differences, the problems are the same.

1. How do I attract an audience? 
2. How do I keep this audience engaged? 
3. How do I close strong? 
4. How do I keep them coming back? 

We’ll approach problems 1-3 as a direct correlation between the writer’s actions of writing a piece and the teacher’s actions of teaching a lesson. Question four has more to do with your approach outside of the classroom and beyond the keyboard.

Over the next few posts, I’ll go over each of these ideas in more detail.

Part Two - The Opening
Part Three - The Middle
Part Four - The Closing
Part Five - Growing your audience.