Write for an Audience of One

Second to his investing brilliance, Warren Buffet is known for his deep-rooted respect for clear communication. His annual letter to shareholders is so well written that it’s considered the gold standard of the form.

Buffet’s secret? He writes with his sisters in mind. He explains: “Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them.”

Thus, if Warren writes something that won’t be clear immediately to Roberta and Doris, he knows he still has work to do.

Novelist Stephen King uses the same technique: He pictures his wife combing through each line of his book in progress. Where will she become bored, laugh, be surprised, or skim? He knows the answer because he knows the reader.

John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, and other world-class writers have also advocated this approach. Says Steinbeck: “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader.”

Vonnegut puts the point poetically: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

Christopher Buckley says that when he sits down to write, he senses writing teacher William Zinsser perched on his shoulder like a parrot. The parrot always says to look for needless verbiage.

Although not as famous as the others, Gregory Ciotti summarizes the principle this way: “Writing to delight a single person whose tastes you understand is practical; writing to appease a faceless audience whose tastes you will never know is impossible.”