Word Works
Learning through writing
at Boise State University
Number 76 November 1995
Published by the BSU Writing Center

The writer's audience, Part 1

An old Doonesbury cartoon hangs on the wall of the Writing Center. It's from 1972, back when most of the characters were still in college. Zonker Harris is tapping away at a typewriter. "Man, have I got a lot of papers due," he mutters.

Mike Doonesbury reads what he is writing: "Most problems, like answers, have finite resolutions. The basis for these resolutions contain many of the ambiguities which conditional man daily struggles with. Accordingly, most problematic solutions are fallible. Mercifully, all else fails; conversely, hope lies in a myriad of polemics. . . ."

Mike asks, "Which paper is this?"

"Dunno," Zonker replies, "I haven't decided yet."

The cartoon is obviously a satire on students who grind out papers just to get them done, not to learn anything from them. But viewed today, from a perspective more than 20 years later, it could be a comment on the problems student writers have with audience.

Zonker's prose is of course sheer nonsense, peppered with academic-sounding buzzwords, pompous sentence structure, and silly devices like that string of introductory modifiers (accordingly, mercifully, conversely). This is funny. But what's not so funny is the implied audience, the professor who is going to read this paper (whichever it turns out to be), and how Zonker has imagined the kind of writing that professor will like. If the paper were submitted to us, we would ask, "What does this guy take me for?" (An interesting question, it turns out. More about it later.)

Audience tends to be a weak link in student academic writing, even though they have mastered it in their everyday communications with family, friends, and co-workers. In the Writing Center, the Assistants are often asking writers, "Who is your audience for this paper?" because it is often not clear. The answer is usually, "I dunno, a general audience, I guess." The word "general" is vague enough, but the noncommittal way writers say it makes clear that they have not thought at all about who they are writing for or why, and that is at the root of the trouble they are having with their drafts.

What can we do to provide students with a reasonable, effective way to become aware of audience and use that awareness in their writing?

For a long time no one really knew what to do. Textbooks on writing frequently advised, "Remember your audience," but they offered little useful advice on how to write for an audience. Only in the past 30 years has the phenomenon of audience and how writers deal with it been studied seriously. Real advances have been made in understanding how audience helps drive the writing process. To get some perspective, let's look at the evolution of thinking about audience.

Traditional views of audience

Audience has in fact been important in rhetoric ever since the Classical period. Some of the Sophists taught their pupils, above all else, how to sway an audience with rhetoric. Plato worried about the ethics of the Sophists' rhetoric, how it could mislead its hearers just as easily as it could lead them to the truth -- or more so. Aristotle devoted considerable attention in his Art of Rhetoric to audience, particularly to an audience's emotional response to a persuasive speech.

Aristotle considered the appeal to audience under three categories: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos was the appeal to the credibility of the rhetor: Was the rhetor a respected member of the community? Was he knowledgeable? Did he have the best interests of the community at heart? Pathos was the appeal to the audience's emotion and was concerned largely with strategies for eliciting the kind of emotional response the rhetor wanted, though Aristotle acknowledged that there had to be ethical constraints. Logos was the appeal to reason.

Aristotle reflected the common assumption of Classical rhetoricians that the audience was "out there," a "target" for the rhetor to "aim at." This was a perfectly plausible assumption, and it went unquestioned through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, on through the middle of the twentieth century. The rhetor (speaker or writer) was the active element in communication; the listener or reader was passive, and only reacted to the words of the rhetor. The message was a thing in itself, a self-contained unit -- be it King Lear, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, a company's report to its stockholders, a course syllabus, or a memo to a department chair. If all went well, the audience would form exactly the same meaning in his or her mind that the rhetor wanted to put there. Zonker, certainly, was hoping the audience of his paper would be passive enough to be impressed by his pompous nonsense and give the paper a decent grade.

More recent views of audience

At least two lines of development have contributed to more recent thinking. The first was the Reader Response theory of literary criticism. The theory developed in part as a corrective to New Criticism, which dominated most literary studies for most of the twentieth century. New Criticism held that meaning had to be in the work itself and could be dug out through "close reading." Scholars might debate back and forth in thousands of papers about the meaning of, say, Moby Dick. The work may have multiple meanings, but they are all already there. Any attempt to relate the work to Melville's life or times, or anything else outside the work itself, including what individual readers make of it, was considered a less valuable, if not illegitimate, line of inquiry. New Criticism made an enormous, rich contribution to modern ways of understanding literature and exerted just as enormous an influence on English teachers. Most of the audience for this Word Works article are in a sense New Critics by training, because that's how we were taught in our English classes. If you remember studying literature in freshman English or a literature survey course, you were probably exposed to New Criticism. It colored all the assumptions about how a literary work should be approached and how one should get meaning out of it. This included the idea that there are "right" and "wrong" interpretations. And, given the power structure of most classrooms, the teacher was "right" and everyone else (except for a few star pupils who always "got it") were "wrong." Even when the teacher used open discussion, the goal was usually to lead the class to the "right" interpretation.

In the 1930's, Louise Rosenblatt raised a lone voice suggesting that the reader took a much more active role than previously assumed. Her work was pretty much overlooked, and it was not until decades later that others understood what she was saying, and Reader Response became a movement. Reader Response theory (to risk oversimplifying) is based on the premise that the reader takes an active part in creating meaning in a text, and any discussion of the meaning of a text has to take into account the meaning created by the reader. The reader creates meaning partly out of his or her knowledge, past experiences with the subject, other reading on the subject, etc. Even Zonker's nonsense, perhaps, might mean something to some readers. In fact, according to Stanley Fish and some other theorists, it has to mean something, because what it "does" to the reader (or what the reader does to it) is an essential part of what it "means."

A second, related line of development has occurred in rhetoric and composition. Many traditional writing textbooks insisted on "audience analysis": before writing a draft, the writer should sit down and figure out exactly who the audience will be. Some textbooks provided elaborate lists of questions to help the writer pinpoint exactly who the reader is. Students generally found this advice hard to follow. When they tried to thoroughly analyze their audiences before writing anything, they often found their writing blocked rather than freed up.

Work in the 1960's and '70's by Chaim Perelman, Kenneth Burke, Wayne C. Booth, and Walter Ong broke new ground for thinking rhetorically about audience. These philosopher- rhetoricians began to conceive of readers as fictional constructs in the writer's mind. The best-known work of this time was Ong's essay, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction." Ong explains:

What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? Two things at least. First, that the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role -- entertainment seekers, reflective sharers of experience, . . . and so on. Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of life.

Even in situations where we might think we have a "real" audience, such as writing a letter (or today, an e-mail) to a friend, Ong maintained that we still fictionalize.

The dimensions of fiction in a letter are many. First, you have no way of adjusting to the friend's real mood as you would be able to adjust in oral conversation. You have to conjecture or confect a mood that he is likely to be in or can assume when the letter comes. And, when it does come, he has to put on the mood that you have fictionalized for him.

Ong's main focus was on literature, though he did suggest that all writers fictionalize and that the idea had relevance to teaching writing. Today, the notion of fictionalizing the audience has been extended to such "non-literary" genres of writing as technical communication, business writing, and academic and professional writing of all kinds. For Perelman and Booth as for Ong, writers, too, must construct fictional or "implied versions" of themselves (in Booth's term) and imagine themselves as part of their own audience.

Synthesizing opposing views: the "reader in the text"

Some scholars were dissatisfied both with the old model of the audience "out there" and the new one of audience wholly fictionalized by the writer. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford argued that the audience "out there," which they termed "audience addressed," made the reader too dominant and confining for the writer. It ignored the writer's ethical responsibilities by encouraging the writer to pander to the audience rather than seek agreement through "good reasons." Ede and Lunsford were dissatisfied with the newer model of Ong and others, which they termed "audience invoked," because it made the writer too dominant and ignored real constraints which audience sometimes imposes.

Instead, they proposed a synthesis of the two views. Rhetorical situations are so many and varied, they explained, that there are times when writers use an addressed audience and times when an invoked audience works better. They proposed that we need to think of the writer-reader relationship as including "a wide and shifting range of roles for both addressed and invoked audiences."

Barry Kroll, working at about the same time as Ede and Lunsford, took a somewhat different slant and came up with one of the most interesting concepts of audience yet. Instead of seeing shifting relationships between writer and reader, Kroll found a different relationship underlying all reader-writer interaction:

[T]he writer's task more centrally involves creating an audience within the text, largely by observing conventions which "imply" or "project" an audience with particular knowledge, assumptions, and attitudes toward the writer and subject matter. A text is a kind of drama, with roles for writer and reader, and the audience is invited to enact the role which the writer has created for the reader.

The notion of a reader "in the text" might be difficult to grasp at first, but it is a powerful one. Let's recall for a moment Zonker's term paper, quoted in the first half of this article. It is a parody, of course, but still it serves as an illustration of how even the most faceless, voiceless writing contains a reader in the text. Specifically, it asks its reader to take on the role of a paper-grading automaton that likes to see overblown phrases and obfuscation in student papers. Zonker has to hope that whichever professor receives this paper will want to play along.

Almost any piece of writing creates an audience once we're aware of how to look for it. A recent letter to the Idaho Statesman, picked at random, provides a good example. It reads,

Sometimes it is hard to look at the truth and do something positive to help change it for the better.

Many people in this county do not see the North End as a beautiful place. It is 80 percent old, dirty, run-down houses. The other 20 percent are beautiful, old, well-kept, historic homes. I suggest North End residents start talking to their neighbors about protecting and keeping the North End nice before lobbying city officials.

The Foothills are not beautiful; they are dry and brown. Let developers put beautiful, big homes with well-manicured lawns on the hills. May the owners plant many trees on their property and the Foothills would be a lot prettier to look at.

Idaho does have many beautiful places, but there is room for improvement.

Now, aside from its refreshingly different view of beauty compared to most letters on the subject and its rather cockeyed logic, the letter implies certain interesting things about its audience. The opening sentence creates an audience who certainly want to change things for the better, but because of understandable, maybe even forgivable human failings ("Sometimes it's hard. . . .") have not yet seen what needs to be done. The writer hopes readers will accept this role and prepare to listen to the truth as she sees it.

(Some of our readers who live elsewhere in the country may be wondering what on earth the Foothills have to do with the North End. In order to reach the Foothills, people have to drive through the North End. North Enders protest further Foothills development because they say, among other things, that the increased traffic will ruin the character of their neighborhood.)

As the letter progresses, the implied audience becomes more complex. There are at least two distinct audiences: (1) North Enders, who should see the truth and fix up their own neighborhood before complaining about the Foothills, and (2) the rest of the Statesman-reading public, who should stop sympathizing with the North Enders and support more Foothills development. There is another aspect of audience, cutting across both groups: an implied audience who will accept the writer's warrant that lawns and trees are more beautiful to look at on the hills than desert.

It may not be fair to use this piece of writing, which would fail at persuading most readers, as an example. But it does serve, we think the illustrated the idea of the "reader in the text."

End of Part 1. In the next issue, we will move from theory to practice and try to suggest ways to help students develop their sense of audience.

RL

Thanks to Bruce Ballenger and Allene Cooper for valuable feedback on drafts of this article.