How to Write for an Enigma
By Robert Walker Cohen
“Know your audience,” goes the old quip.
When you can’t know your audience? Take a risk.
This challenge most often arises in specialized projects targeting small, exclusive, and/or emergent sets of readers. The problem extends to writing-related contexts, such as direct sales or legal work.
Investor relations, fundraising, cutting-edge tech, high-ticket B2B sales, grant writing, and court memos all may include a component of writing for an enigmatic reader. Degrees of obscurity will vary.
When engaging with a mystery, you’ll first want to manage your risk. Here’s how I think about this:
Find out what you can. If other writers have written to this audience before, even if only very few (common with emerging tech) — study their work, study the audience reaction, and study any data points in the exchange that may be revealing.
Make plausible assumptions. Once you’ve gathered the available data, you can begin to make assumptions about the intended reader, their level of sophistication, the type of tone or voice they may appreciate, etc.
Check with reliable sources. Typically — though not always — you will want to verify your assumptions with team members, leadership, or others with a degree of experience engaging with the intended audience. This can save you a lot of time, and crucially, is an easy way to prevent errors or faux pas.
Decide a plan. You will want to collate the results from the above steps into an action plan. This internal synthesis does not need to be highly polished or presentable; it only needs to make sense and be actionable. Raw notes that only you can decipher are sufficient at this stage, though in team-oriented or longer-term projects, some legibility will be appreciated by your colleagues (or even future-you). I personally prefer nicely arranged pre-project notes, but the reality is that your pursuit of polished clarity and precision can be saved for your draft.
Concluding caveat — I’ve found that unless the client specifically asks otherwise, or you’re working on a personal creative project, it’s best to hedge conservatively with your first attempt at speaking to an obscure audience. You can save your more unconventional ideas for when you are more familiar with them. That is, if you discover your mystery audience is receptive to the unconventional to begin with.
The reality is that while we can manage our risk, we can’t know an enigma until they read what we have to say.
You must take a leap.
Manage your risk poorly: Shark-infested waters.
Manage your risk well: Silk luxury linens.
