Audience Analysis in Writing PDF

# Audience 2 Who will read (or hear) what you are writing? A seemingly obvious but crucially important question. Your audience affects your writing in various ways. Consider a piece of writing as simple as a text from a mother to her son: *Pls. take chicken out to thaw and feed Annye. Remember Dr....

# Audience 2 Who will read (or hear) what you are writing? A seemingly obvious but crucially important question. Your audience affects your writing in various ways. Consider a piece of writing as simple as a text from a mother to her son: *Pls. take chicken out to thaw and feed Annye. Remember Dr. Wong at 4.* On the surface, this brief note is a straightforward reminder to do three things. But in fact it is a complex message filled with compressed information for a specific audience. The writer (the mother) counts on the reader (her son) to know a lot that can be left unsaid. She expects that he knows that the chicken is in the freezer and needs to thaw in time to be cooked for dinner; she knows that he knows who Annye is (a pet?), what he or she is fed, and how much; she assumes that he knows who (and where) Dr. Wong is. She doesn't need to spell any of that out because she knows what her son knows and what he needs to know and in her text she can be brief. She understands her audience. Think how different such a reminder would be were it written to another audience - a babysitter, perhaps, or a friend helping out while Mom is out of town. What you write, how much you write, how you phrase it, even your choice of genre (memo, essay, email, note, speech) - all are influenced by the audience you envision. And your audience will interpret your writing according to their own expectations and experiences, not yours. When you are a student, your audience is most often your teachers, so you need to be aware of their expectations and know the conventions (rules, often unstated) for writing in specific academic fields. You may make statements that seem obvious to you, not realizing that your instructors may consider them assertions that must be proved with evidence # Rhetorical Situations of one sort or another. Or you may write more or less formally than teachers expect. Understanding your audience's expectations-by asking outright, by reading materials in your field of study, by trial and error-is important to your success as a college writer. This point is worth dwelling on. You are probably reading this textbook for a writing course. As a student, you will be expected to produce essays with few or no errors. If as part of your job or among friends and family you correspond using email and texts you may question such standards; after all, many of the messages you get in these contexts are not grammatically perfect. But in a writing class, the instructor needs to see your best work. Whatever the rhetorical situation, your writing must meet the expectations of your audience. ## Identify your audience. Audiences may be defined as known, multiple, or unknown. Known audiences can include people with whom you're familiar as well as people you don't know personally but whose needs and expectations you do know. You yourself are a known, familiar audience, and you write to and for yourself often. Class notes, to-do lists, reminders, and journals are all written primarily for an audience of one: you. For that reason, they are often in shorthand, full of references and code that you alone understand. Other known, familiar audiences include anyone you actually know- friends, relatives, teachers, classmates-and whose needs and expectations you understand. You can also know what certain readers want and need, even if you've never met them personally, if you write for them within a specific shared context. Such a known audience might include PC gamers who read cheat codes that you have posted on the Internet for beating a game; you don't know those people, but you know roughly what they know about the game and what they need to know, and you know how to write about it in ways they will understand. You often have to write for multiple audiences. Business memos or reports may be written initially for a supervisor, but he or she may pass them along to others. Grant proposals may be reviewed by four to six levels of readers-each, of course, with its own expectations and perspectives. Even writing for a class might involve multiple audiences: your instructor and your classmates. Unknown audiences can be the most difficult to address since you can't be sure what they know, what they need to know, how they'll react. Such an audience could be your downstairs neighbor, with whom you're chatted occasionally in the laundry room. How will she respond to your letter asking her to sponsor you in an upcoming charity walk? Another unknown audience-perhaps surprisingly-might be many of your instructors, who want-and expect! -you to write in ways that are new to you. While you can benefit from analyzing any audience, you need to think most carefully about those you don't know. ## Thinking About Audience * Whom do you want to reach? To whom are you writing (or speaking)? * What is your audience's background-their education and life experiences? It may be important for you to know, for example, whether your readers attended college, fought in a war, or have young children. * What are their interests? What do they like? What motivates them? What do they care about? * Is there any demographic information that you should keep in mind? Consider whether race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, occupations, religious beliefs, economic status, and so on should affect what or how you write. For example, writers for *Men's Health*, *InStyle*, and *Out* must consider the particular interests of each magazine's readers. * What political circumstances may affect their reading? What attitudes-opinions, special interests, biases-may affect the way your audience reads your piece? Are your readers conservative, liberal, or middle of the road? Politics may take many other forms as well-retirees on a fixed income may object to increased school taxes, so a letter arguing for such an increase would need to appeal to them differently than would a similar letter sent to parents of young children. ## Rhetorical Situations * What does your audience already know-or believe-about your topic? What do you need to tell them? What is the best way to do so? Those retirees who oppose school taxes already know that taxes are a burden for them; they may need to know why schools are justified in asking for more money every few years. A good way to explain this may be with a bar graph showing how property values benefit from good schools with adequate funding. Consider which *strategies* will be effective-narrative, comparison, something else? * What's your relationship with your audience, and how should it affect your language and tone? Do you know them, or not? Are they friends? Colleagues? Mentors? Adversaries? Strangers? Will they likely share your *stance*? In general, you need to write more formally when you're addressing readers you don't know, and you may address friends and colleagues more informally than you would a boss. * What does your audience need and expect from you? Your history professor, for example, may need to know how well you can discuss the economy of the late Middle Ages in order to assess your learning; he may expect you to write a carefully reasoned argument, drawing conclusions from various sources, with a readily identifiable thesis in the first paragraph. Your boss, on the other hand, may need an informal email that briefly lists your sales contacts for the day; she may expect that you list the contacts in the order in which you saw them, that you clearly identify each one, and that you briefly say how well each contact went. What *genre* is most appropriate? * What kind of response do you want? Do you want readers to believe or do something? To accept as valid your information on a topic? To understand why an experience you once had matters to you? * How can you best appeal to your audience? Is there a particular *medium* that will best reach them? Are there any *design* requirements? (Elderly readers may need larger type, for instance.)