Week Two - Audience

This week we looked at knowing your market, and knowing how and why to sell your writing. I found the reading about womens' magazines particularly interesting, as I find a lot of my books from the suggestions in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and More. 


The task this week was to write a 250 piece about 'glasses' for any publication of our choice. I chose to write a piece for Cosmopolitan...

Geek or chic?

For years, people have been taunted and ridiculed for being forced to wear glasses, a less than fashionable but necessary aid in, well…seeing things. It started in the school playground and didn’t get much better as we got older.  The one absolute must, apart from the bow tie, in the stereotypical ‘geek’ themed fancy dress costume, is the big, thick rimmed glasses. But recently, with the rise of the geek chic, it seems glasses are no longer needed in just fancy dress, and rather just in, well…dress. After years of the fashion conscious secretly wearing contacts and some even going as far as to get laser eye surgery, so desperate they were to not have to wear the dreaded specs, it seems glasses have made an amazing comeback…or should that be come forward, seeing as they were never here in the first place? Suddenly everywhere you turn there is a girl, or boy, walking down the street in a pair of skinny jeans, big thick cardigan and big thick glasses to match…the bigger, the better. With celebrities such as Lady Ga Ga, David Beckham and even Madonna getting involved, it seems that glasses are no longer a sign of the geek; in fact, you’re a geek if you’re not strutting around behind bottle bottom thick lenses. So there you have it, it’s time to get rid of your contacts, dust off your abandoned specs, and embrace the geek inside you, waiting to get back out.

I decided to write for Cosmopolitan as it is a magazine that I buy and read regularly, and therefore I know the audience and also what to expect from the magazine. The idea for the article actually came from looking through an issue of Cosmo, as there were several advertisements for designer glasses among the fashion pages, along with pictures of celebrities embracing the geek chic style. I chose to make the piece about fashion, as fashion is clearly a big part of Cosmo, with around 50 pages dedicated solely to it in each issue, and the audience for the magazine are women aged approximately between 18 and 40, most of whom are interested in fashion to some degree.

It is a lighthearted article, designed to fill a space and entertain the audience, who could arguably be said to be either impulse buyers -just picking the magazine up during a shopping trip, or to read on the train, or have a specific interest in fashion and buying the magazine every month, or somewhere in the middle of the two. I wrote the article thinking of what I like to read, and therefore wrote it as a piece about fashion for people who like to read about it, but don't take it too seriously.

The lifespan for the article is obviously a month, as that is how often the magazine is published. The magazines stay on the shelf if not sold until the new issue comes and replaces them. 

I think the article would work well in Cosmo, as it is written in a casual, but not too casual, register, and ties in with other items that would be found in the publication.