[:fr]The boys spent this essay question criticizing the multiple choice question, gotcha-ing a typo in the lesson, and otherwise wasted an hour. No one’s proud of this and outside the sky’s taken on the most eery orange I’ve seen since we left Mars.

From the Interaction Design Foundation:

​Question 1
How does persuasion work? (1 point)
By presenting an airtight case
By inviting your audience to view the world as you do
Through demonstrating your similarity with your audience

Essay Question
What are the demographic characteristics of your target audience? …
Choose the 3 most prominent of these characteristics to your target audience. Use your favorite search engine to conduct a search along the lines of “values of xxx”, … What are the most prominent values you’ve located? … Which of these values coincide with your company’s values? Which with your own personal values? … How can you reflect these shared values in your website?

And they also asked us to consider the language of our target audience.

From the WAP Staff:

First of all: Question 1 is stupid. Demonstrating similarities between yourself and your audience is one persuasion trick, not “how persuasion” works. Persuasion can be done more or less evilly. Persuading people to vote for you based on having an accent like theirs and sharing their prejudices is an evil way to persuade them to vote for you. Persuading people to vote for you by explaining to them how your policies will improve the community is a good way to persuade them to vote for you. You could make the case that good persuasion is done by convincing others to follow those aspects of themselves that are best, but the best aspects of a human being are all the same: the divine light within. And appealing to that is the opposite of appealing to narrow identity politics.

Second, look at this:
The above research, though from disparate academic disciplines converges ​

It needs a comma after “disciplines”.

Third: What’s the question?

Ah yes, our target audience.

[Responding to the list of demographics suggested by IDF]

Socioeconomics: enough money and leisure to buy a $4 ebook and possibly a $15 novelty tote.
Religion: We are desperately reaching out to all faiths and all points within the conservative-liberal theological spectrum. Note that we consider things like secular humanism, artism, sciencism, and who-cares-ism to be faiths. People have more than one faith. Our demographic should by rights be everyone, but perhaps people with more inclusive viewpoints would be more likely to bother with us than people with more fundamentalist leanings. At least in the beginning, before we win everyone over with Purest Love.
Region: English-speaking world, which is now everywhere.
Political leaning: Again, Something Deeperism [the position that there is a Truth and we humans Know It and must learn to better and better understand and follow It; but this Knowledge is not literal/definitive; it is more a process and a pointing-towards than the sort of thing you can catch in ideas and/or feelings] wants to connect with everyone and to help us all to build a common set of values upon which we can build a common future. We are seeking a faith from which we can all start. It must, however, be admitted that at least initially–before our good-intentions win over every heart, mind and soul–our readership may be more rather than less politically liberal.
Ethnicity: It is against our dogma to admit the existence of different races and ethnicities. All slides together as an interrelated ooze. I suppose that many in our readership will self-identify as “human beings first, with xyz race creed nationality profession or etc distant seconds”; but no one’s dogmas are perfect and we hope that a wide range of notions will read our book and be gently led to greater and greater wisdom. And let us not forget that not everyone has the luxury of this quiet perch.
Education: Our readership–were it to exist–would enjoy ideas and literature. I worry that this imagined readership will be disappointed by our first offering, in which case we’ll have no readership.
Gender: All genders beg all the time for Pure Love
Age: Adults

Values of theological liberals:

True Religion involves living the Truth rather than agreeing to any specific set of ideas about the Truth.
True Religion can be seen by its fruits: compassion, kindness, wisdom; and these fruits are not the sole possession of any one faith. So demand compassion, kindness and wisdom of yourself and others, not the recitation of a creed.
The point of religion is not historical details, but the Way the religion points towards. So don’t lose time, energy, and human connection arguing, for example, over whether or not Jesus really rose from the dead.

Every staff member shares these values. And they are enshrined in our company mission statement.

Values of book lovers: more liberal, less disciplined, value beautiful writing, engaging writing [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201504/being-book-lover]

The former is perhaps true of Wandering Albatross Press, but we don’t want to encourage narrow sectarianism and so will not discuss politics on the landing page. As to the latter: we are vehement supporters of discipline–at least we vehemently ​mean to be. We can’t seem to match our aspirations with our reality on this one, so we will not discuss this confusion on the landing page. On second thought, maybe we will: since it is a common problem and one our readers probably share.

We also value beautiful and engaging writing.

Valuable intellectual traits: What our readership is aiming for: intellectual curiosity, empathy, courage, autonomy, integrity, perseverance; fair-mindedness [http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/valuable-intellectual-traits/528]

Staff and organization also value these traits.
Note that the old problem remains: the decent UX designer does not give people what their shallows think they want, but what their souls really want/need/are; however, while all humans deepdown long for these traits, our readership would, were we capable of writing a book worthy of having a readership, probably be more aware of their inner longing to develop these traits than the average bystander.

How can we reflect our shared values (meaning to be more disciplined than we are; beauitufl and engaging writing; Something Deeperist ethos [discussed in the values of theological liberals]; valuing intellectual traits like curiosity, empathy, courage, integrity … )??

We can be better organized. The landing page can point to an overview of Something Deeperism: a well-written, intellectually worthy overview and guide to essays on Something Deeperism (two birds with one stone). And the selection of writings can also link to a page introducing and organizing selections of other author’s writings we’ve culled from Project Gutenberg and laid out to dry on page after epage–that would be a way to share a love of good writing with our readership. Naturally, it would also be nice if we could write beautifully and engagingly throughout the site.
I’m not sure how to approach our shared sense of inadequate discipline. On the one hand, grovelling in it is counterproductive; on the other hand, pretending it away is also counterproductive. We’ll leave it as it is: peppered with confessions of our misgivings in our activities and their results.

Target audience’s language

Formality of language (very informal/much slang to very formal/no slang) – Varying, depending on the joke. The main thing our readership loves is a good literary joke.

Level of language (simple language to high vocabulary). Again, it depends on the joke.

Sentence length (short bursts or lengthy thoughts). All these depend on the joke employed in a given moment.

Level of business savvy reflected in language use (very savvy or somewhat clunky)

All this for five points? Where have I gone wrong in life?[:]