This week has featured a lot of navel-gazing (and it’s going to get worse before it gets better). I’ve told you why I write, and what I write, and a pleasant little story about some of the people who encouraged me to write.

Now, at last, I’m going to talk about you. Or, at the very least, I’m going to try to.

When it comes right down to it, there are always going to be visitors popping by the site — curious because of some teaser link I posted on Twitter or searching for an answer to a pressing question.

Maybe some of them will stick around. Maybe you’re one of them. If so, I suspect you’ve already found real value in some of the stuff I’ve said. I don’t really write for passers-by, though.

I write for a regular audience that consists of several different kinds of writers. They fall, broadly, into two categories — and are all defined by a single powerful characteristic. I’ll get to that later, but first let’s do some discriminatin’.

Bloggers, Students, and Business Writers

I first started this blog to talk technical writing — not the sort of high-level stuff I do in my job every day, but the general perspective and the handy tips and tricks that would make non-writers’ writing easier and better. That, I thought, would be my core audience.

I still talk to them pretty regularly. In fact, today’s article is aimed directly at them. It falls into the category I’ve titled “For Work” (or, occasionally, “For School”), which features refreshers on mechanics of writing, learning how to use your writing software to save you time, and designing your documents so that they work well once they’re written.

I spend the first part of every week talking to this crowd. For a long time it was writing exercises for them on Mondays, and informative articles on Tuesdays. These days, I do a three-day Business Writing series every week, starting with an intro story on Sunday, background and additional information on Monday, and then application (and sometimes a writing exercise) on Tuesday.

Storytellers and Creative Writers

I knew from the start I wouldn’t be able to keep my focus exclusively on tech writing, though. Sure, it’s useful information, but it’s a skill I learned to pay the bills. My real love is creative writing.

So, almost as a treat for myself, I decided to give the second half of every week to creative writers and storytellers. They get articles on developing believable characters and writing natural-sounding dialogue. They get advice on plotting a novel and sticking through the tumultuous phases of the creative process to get a draft finished.

The storytellers can benefit from my experience — not because I’ve got proven credentials, as I do with the tech writing — but because as writers we share a common, unique experience. As I said just a couple weeks ago, that’s an intensely valuable connection among writers.

Readers

There’s a lot of information available at Unstressed Syllables, and people come here from a lot of different places for a lot of different reasons. The best of my readers all share one thing in common, though, as I said from the very start.

The writers who get the most out of Unstressed Syllables are the ones who love to read.

Simple as that. Whether you’re here to learn critical facts, pick up handy tips and tricks, build better worlds…or just to keep track of me and the things going on in my life, you’ve got to drink deep before you’ll really find what you’re looking for.

Lucky for me, I know a lot of people with a deep love for words. And I’m meeting new ones every day.

As I said yesterday, I really want to know where you fit in. Tell me why you’re here, what brings you back, and what I’m doing right (or wrong) in my efforts to make you more comfortable in the kind of writing you do.

But whether you comment or not…thanks for reading.