Choosing Form and Tone for Your Audience
Identify the audience for and purpose of writing before beginning, selecting the appropriate form, tone, and register to match the intended reader and communicative goal
Typical age: 9–10 years
“Before your child starts a piece of writing, do they think about who will read it and why — adjusting their tone, vocabulary, and format accordingly, like writing more formally for a teacher than for a friend?”
0 / 3 mastered
Explore graph
Needs first
- Writing Craft VocabularyREQUIRED
Identifying audience, purpose, form, tone, and register before writing requires all these as named vocabulary
- Formal and Informal English
Formal/informal register awareness supports matching tone to audience and purpose
- Planning Ideas Before WritingREQUIRED
Identifying audience and purpose before writing builds on general planning skills; the step up is from planning content to strategically matching form and tone to audience
- Author's word choices
Identifying audience and purpose before writing requires understanding how authorial choices shape reader experience — you are now making those choices deliberately
- Planning a Task
Identifying audience and purpose before writing is the writing-domain form of the universal planning habit
Unlocks next
- Writing Across GenresREQUIRED
Writing for different forms requires KS2 audience/purpose awareness
- Planning Narratives
Authorial techniques planning builds on identifying audience/purpose
- Persuasive WritingREQUIRED
Argument writing extends KS2 identifying audience and purpose
- Developed Informational and Explanatory WritingREQUIRED
Writing to explain requires understanding audience and purpose from KS2