 I'm Demira Hayes from the Air Force Research Institute at Air University. Welcome to our video series, Academic Writing for Airmen. In today's session, I want to discuss two questions that you need to answer early in the writing process. Number one, why am I writing? And number two, who am I writing for? If you want to produce a well-written, well-argued essay, these questions really are not optional. You must be able to answer them for yourself and use the answers to those questions to guide your writing of the essay. Compare writing an essay to launching a military operation. I think that one of the first things you would do before launching the operation is identify the purpose of the operation. What is it supposed to accomplish? What is its intended outcome? The same thing is true with writing an essay. Now, yes, your immediate purpose may be to complete an assignment and get a grade, but think more broadly than that. What do you want your essay to accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? So think about how you would complete statements like this. My goal in this essay is, for example, to influence policy or help change the way the Air Force does X, Y, or Z. The purpose of this essay is, for example, to help military leaders form a strategy to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions. This paper will examine, for example, Iran's current nuclear capabilities to show that a particular U.S. deterrence policy would be effective. In this essay, I will analyze the problem of, for example, maintenance issues with a particular kind of aircraft and propose a different maintenance program to make the aircraft more efficient. Now, these statements, my goal in this essay or my purpose for writing this essay, may or may not appear verbatim in the introduction of your essay, but you should be able to articulate them before you ever start writing a draft. You need to know your purpose up front. Then you should ask yourself, what will I need to do in my essay to achieve that purpose? What will I need to do in my essay to convince the decision makers that we do need a new maintenance process or that we should implement a new deterrence policy toward Iran? Ask yourself these questions. What evidence will I need? What arguments will I need to make to accomplish my purpose? What ideas will I need to explain to accomplish my purpose? Of course, you won't be able to convince all readers of anything in an essay, but if you know your purpose before you start writing, you'll have a much better chance of presenting a good argument in the essay and a much better chance of accomplishing your purpose. So one question that you need to ask before you start writing the essay is what is my purpose? A second question that you need to ask is who will be my audience? Who am I writing for? Who will read my essay? Now, many writers disregard this question, but how can you effectively communicate with your audience if you don't know who they are? Of course, if you're a student, your professor is your immediate audience, but think beyond that. Who will be interested in your research? Who will your proposal affect? Who is likely to think that your thesis matters and those people are your true intended audience? Then ask yourself these questions about your audience. Why will they read your essay? Do they already understand the importance or significance of the topic? If not, then your introduction will have to work to capture their interest and convince them that the topic is important. What does your audience already know about the topic? If they are experts, then you can go deep in the topic pretty quickly. If they're not experts, then you'll probably need to fill them in on the background of the issue. And if your audience is some of both, then you have to find some middle ground between those two. Another question, what terms will need to be defined? What will need to be explained for my intended audience to understand the concepts I'm discussing? What kind of evidence will your audience need? Now for some audiences, numbers may be the most convincing evidence. Statistics, data. For other audiences, historical evidence, maybe case studies, might be more convincing. And for some audiences, the testimony of experts may be the most valuable or convincing kind of evidence. Now here's an important question. What attitude is your audience likely to have toward your thesis? For example, will your audience be hostile toward your thesis? Now stop for a minute and think about the difference it would make if you knew that your audience would be hostile to your proposal. One way it would make a difference is you would probably spend a lot more time dealing with possible objections to your audience, since your audience would likely hold some of those objections. You might also want to write an introduction that tries to diffuse some of the hostility before you ever state your thesis. And closely related to your purpose is what do you want your reader to do after reading your essay? So take the time to ask these questions early in the writing process. What is my purpose for writing? Who is my intended audience? Who will read this essay? What is their attitude toward this essay? What is their prior knowledge about my topic? And then use the answers to these questions to shape your essay or to help you make decisions as you write. As always, we would love to get your feedback on this video series. So please use the email address on the screen to let us know how these videos are helping you or maybe to suggest improvements. Or if you want to see a topic that we aren't offering, then let us know that as well. Thank you and we'll see you next time.