Word Works
Learning through writing
at Boise State University
Number 77 December 1995
Published by the BSU Writing Center

The writer's audience, Part 2

In the November Word Works, we described briefly the history of the concept of audience, how it evolved from the audience "out there" to a more complex view. Now, audience is seen both as a "real" audience "out there" and as a fictionalized construct which the writer uses as part of the invention process, and which is implied within a text. The "reader in the text" tells readers what role they are asked to play as audience and invites their assent to play that role. In Part 2, we will consider the question:

How can we teach about audience?

One of the reasons student writers have trouble thinking about the audience of their writing is that they are novices in the "discourse community" of the university. In their freshman year they receive their initiation into the academic community. It is sometimes a painful process. They are told that now they are expected to produce academic writing, but their idea of academic writing is fuzzy, and unless someone explains it to them they may have to teach themselves through months of trial and error.

But they don't just have to learn "academic writing" in general. Writing in literature is different from writing in history, or teacher education, or history, or criminal justice, or biology. An entering freshman is confronted not with one discourse community, but several different ones, each with its own conventions of language, content, organization, and format. Each with a different kind of audience.

Though the professional literature in rhetoric and composition does not have a great wealth of material on teaching student writers to understand and use audience, a few strategies have shown promise. We will present four here that you and your students might find helpful. Please keep in mind that the suggestions are tentative. If you have other strategies that work, please share them with us. Perhaps we can revisit audience again in a future issue of Word Works.

Consider audience relationships

Fred Pfister and Joanne Petrick devised a rather elaborate heuristic (invention strategy) for thinking about audience. It consists of 18 questions and in its complete form looks a lot like the older audience- analysis checklists. But the resemblance is only on the surface. Whereas an audience-analysis checklist focuses on the characteristics of the audience which are static and unchanging, Pfister and Petrick's questions focus on relationships, which are fluid and changeable. Here we'll boil down the questions somewhat and show the four general perspectives the questions represent.

Relationship of audience to itself What are the physical, cultural, economic environment of the audience? What are its ethics, myths, prejudices, preconceptions?

Relationship of audience to the subject What does the audience already know, think, feel about the subject?

Relationship of audience to the writer What does the audience know and feel about me? What experiences, interests, values do we share? What is my purpose in addressing this audience? What role am I asking the audience to play?

Relationship of audience to the form What mode of development and organization does the audience expect to find? What tone, level of diction, level of sentence complexity?

Pfister and Petrick's heuristic is helpful because it can easily become part of the writer's invention strategy. Several studies, including the case study of three writers by Robert G. Roth, discussed below, have demonstrated that many successful writers "invent" their audience as well as their content, and that their concept of the audience changes and evolves just as their content does during the course of writing.

Teach audience through ethos, pathos, and logos

Another way of looking at relationships is through the combination of Aristotle's three appeals, mentioned in Part 1 of this article. They provide a fairly simple way of thinking about the interrelationships among writer, reader, and subject. Today, rhetoricians define ethos, pathos, and logos in a broader sense than Aristotle gave them. Ethos includes not just character and credibility, but also the writer's voice, attitude toward the subject and audience, and the "persona" the writer projects to the reader. Pathos includes not just an appeal to emotion but an awareness of the reader's frame of mind, preconceptions, values, and assumptions. Logos, which for Aristotle was pretty much confined to reasoning, now includes all kinds of evidence, testimony, personal experience, etc. The three appeals apply to the "reader in the text" as well as they do to the reader "out there," and they provide a productive way to think about audience. We sometimes introduce Aristotle's appeals to students by superimposing them on Wayne Booth's "Rhetorical Triangle." Aristotle himself might have been puzzled by what we are doing, but it works for many students.

Writer - ethos
          appeal of good character
            voice - tone - credibility

Reader - pathos              Subject - logos
appeal to emotion            or appeal to reason
frame of mind claim,         reasons, grounds
warrants - backing
The triangle dramatizes the idea that writer, subject, and audience are interrelated. As a piece of writing evolves, not only does the content (logos) change, but as it changes the writer's concept of who she expects will read the content is likely to change, and so is the writer's concept of her own voice or persona. Or a change might take place first in the writer's sense of ethos or pathos and will spread throughout the triangle from that starting point.

Ask, "Who do I want my audience to be?"

Russell Long proposed an alternative to the Classical notion of a pre-existing audience by suggesting a new kind of question the writer might ask.

Rather than beginning with the traditional question, "who is my audience?", we now begin with, "who do I want my audience to be?" Rather than encouraging a superficial, stereotyped view of reader, we are asking the student to begin with a statement about the audience she wants to create.

While preparing to write these two issues on Audience, we thought we'd try Long's question to see what happened. Following is our freewriting, just as we wrote it. First we tried the traditional "audience analysis" question, then we tried Long's.

Who is our audience?

Mostly BSU faculty, other faculty and writing- center people at other campuses. Also office staff. So we're writing to an educated audience used to reading at all levels, from professional journals to trashy novels all in the same day. They are interested in writing and what we have to say about it; otherwise they throw away their copy of Word Works as soon as it arrives. At least we know that a fair proportion of people in most departments read it, because they have told us they do. We also know that they are busy and have little time to do much extra reading, so we hope they don't treat it as junk mail.

Probably they haven't thought much about audience directly, though they must be aware of it. Certainly they recognize when student writing is pitched toward the wrong audience (when it's pompous or too casual), and certainly they have dealt with the notion of audience in their own writing -- memos, professional articles, etc. -- though perhaps not consciously.

That helped some, but not very much. The question "Who is my audience?" still assumed an audience "out there" that Word Works is "aimed at." So even though we were able to say quite a bit about our audience, we didn't say much that would help us along in the process of inventing this article. In fact, in trying to define our audience, we started to wander off on other topics, such as distribution and format, which helped not at all in trying to get this piece written for this issue. On the contrary, it was rather daunting. What if we were to write thousands of words and it turned out to be nothing but junk mail? Then we tried:

Who do we want our audience to be?

We want our audience to be friendly toward us, of course. We want them to reflect on their experiences of struggling with audience in their own writing, in their students' writing, in designing assignment for their students.

We want our audience to read Word Works to extract information and ideas they can use, but easily, not as they might have to work through a professional article, slowly, paragraph by paragraph. On the other hand, we want them to read WW kind of as relaxation, something coming across their desks that isn't exactly play but isn't exactly not-work, either. So we want to find a voice that is friendly, relaxed, like colleagues talking over coffee, more open-collar than suit-and-tie.

Right now they probably have no idea who Ong is, or Pfister and Petrick, or Long, or any of the important people who have worked on audience. But we'll probably tell about their work anyway, hoping that our readers will be persuaded to care when the see how interesting the theory is.

That was better. It gave us something to start with, a way of figuring out how to begin, how much to include, where to go with the material. Before trying these audience questions, we had worked out an elaborate idea-map of everything we thought should go into the article. After answering the questions above, to our surprise, the content of this article changed considerably. Parts that we expected to take up a lot of space, for instance the historical development, ended up taking up relatively little, and parts that we expected to be minor and short, such as the question of pedagogy, ended up occupying major space.

Use the "reader in the text"

Teachers can also use the idea of the reader in the text to help students write in their disciplines. They can do this by showing some examples of writing in the discipline and discussing what kind of reader is implied, or in other words what role the reader is asked to play in the writing. It wouldn't hurt to include some examples that don't work for the audience, like the "Foothills" letter we just examined.

If no particular audience has been designated in an assignment, the professor becomes the default audience. That isn't necessarily bad; sometimes it's better to leave it at that rather than contrive an audience that isn't realistic. Students can still write effectively to a "universal audience" (in Chaim Perelman's phrase) even if the teacher is going to be the only reader. One good reason for using peer- response sessions, where students can bring their drafts for feedback from their classmates, is to help broaden their sense of audience, and at the same time make it more concrete.

You might wonder if there isn't a problem with the teacher being the default reader, even if the paper is supposed to be for a different audience. Students may know that their imaginary audience is going to be someone else, but after all, guess who's going to grade the paper -- isn't that the bottom line? Don't they feel torn between the two audiences, the made-up one and the real one?

We wondered the same thing, but we are not so sure it's as much of a problem as one might think. Students who write successful papers don't appear to get confused when an audience beyond the teacher is specified in the assignment. Those who are confused sometimes benefit from being encouraged to think of the purpose of their writing. If their purpose is only to get the assignment done, the audience problem will persist. But if they focus on the purpose they want to achieve with the assigned audience, they might be able to get beyond the teacher as grader and think about communicating.

Recently Carol Holder from Cal Poly at Pomona spoke on campus as part of our WID workshop series. She stressed that, whenever possible, students should be given an audience other than the teacher. Faculty at Cal Poly have found that students have an easier time writing when given such an audience, and they do better.

Should a writer always consider audience?

All these ideas about audience notwithstanding, just how useful is it to require everyone to think about audience from the beginning of the process? Robert G. Roth's study of the writing processes of three successful student writers writing persuasive essays suggests that even skillful writers vary. One student, "David," wrote only to please himself, but in doing so succeeded in creating a strong presence of the "reader in the text." The other two, "Laura" and "Johanna," started with constructs of their audiences as uninformed, narrow-minded, and opposed to their views. But during the process their concepts evolved until they were writing to audiences that were more informed and open- minded. Laura encountered a writer's block because thinking about audience was getting in her way and she finally had to say, "To hell with it! I mean, I'm gonna write what I want to write. I don't care any more." This got her out of the block and allowed her to finish the draft -- after which she was able to call up the audience again and revise with the audience in mind.

Some scholars have cautioned that too much attention to audience can be as harmful to a writer as not enough attention. Peter Elbow argues that many writers, like Laura in Roth's study, often have to say "To hell with it!" in order to discover their ideas. He argues further that writing too much for an audience can cause us to write "safe," instead of taking risks and pushing the limits of our thinking. With some kinds of assignments, audience can be enabling, but other times audience can hamper innovative thinking. Audience can even block a writer. This sometimes happens to students trying to write for their teachers, who (they assume) already know more about the subject than they ever will.

Elbow even suggests sometimes writing to the "wrong" audience when the "right" audience is too distant or intimidating to work with. A colleague of ours reports that when in college, he had trouble thinking of his professors as anything but graders. So he wrote by imagining a close friend as his audience, someone to whom he always showed his drafts and whose reactions he liked to imagine: where in the text that friend would laugh, or get excited over an idea, or tell him to stop sounding like an idiot. The friend was an enabling audience, and by thinking about how to reach that audience he managed at the same time to write for a more universal audience, including his professors.

Every writer needs to ask, as Zonker Harris needs to ask before he gets too far into his paper, "On what basis do I claim my reader's attention?" Each of us, in our own disciplines, should help students find ways to address that question.

RL

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