For this English essay, the teacher demanded I write a report on my autobiography’s target audience. This assignment makes sense from a literary and business/marketing standpoint. Your writing can change dramatically just by knowing who your audience is. If Jeff Bezos wrote an autobiography, most people would want to read about his struggles to make Amazon successful. However, if some hypothetical president wrote an autobiography, we’d prefer to read about his political career, not his time as a lawyer. While the audience’s interest in Bezos was because of his job, the opposite was true for the president. In an autobiography, you’re telling your whole story, but there must be a priority on certain sections: sections that are interesting to the reader. As you can see, knowing who your audience is can drastically change your autobiography.
For my autobiography, it depends. The class assignment is to write an autobiography by the end of the school year. While I have had exciting stories throughout my life, I’d hardly want them to be the fabric of my autobiography. I have the ambition to become a strong financier. If I were successful in becoming that, most of my childhood successes might seem redundant. While I have to write a miniature autobiography for the school assignment, it will be incomplete. I fully intend to write a second autobiography when I’m old and gray. I’m pointing out that there will be two autobiographies because the focus changes depending on the autobiography. When the focus changes, so does the target audience. To avoid confusion, I will call the incomplete autobiography “Childhood” in this essay and the one I’ll write in the future “Old.” Don’t worry; you don’t have to tell me I’m the most creative man in the world. I already know. “Childhood” will likely focus on life in Dayton, Texas, and my comical and successful efforts to make money. However, “Old” will focus on my profession. The target audience for “Childhood” is no one. Perhaps, family and maybe close friends may read it, but America would be bored out of their minds to read about a random sixteen-year-old that grew up in the middle of nowhere. My life is uninteresting. Nobody knows who I am. “Childhood” will address my grandmother and all my friends. That’s it. However, the target audience for “Old” will likely be men interested in business, but that’s just speculation. I haven’t lived my whole life; knowing the story I want to tell in fifty years is impossible.
Asher Sisneros 