Transcript Lesson 3 Essentials Video: Audience

STUDENT #1: For me, it's really more thinking about the reader. Before, it was about myself and how I process words and create sentences. But once I got to college and took a college writing course, it was all about, who am I writing to? And what are they going to think about this? And is my point going to get across?

DAISHAWN: So when I think about audience, I normally think about how I progress as a college writer when it comes to the audience. Because throughout high school, it was just you're writing this for your professor. Well, for your teacher. Now that I'm in college, it's more like your writing this, but based on the prompt, It may not just be for your professor. They may give you the audience or you may have to think about the topic and what kind of audience would be reading something of that nature.

STUDENT #2: In high school, the only audience we had was basically the teacher because she was grading it, the paper. And now I feel like our audience was our class plus the teacher. Everybody looked at our papers. So I know how to approach different subjects differently with different audiences.

STUDENT #3: My goal is truly to, if I drop my paper out my backpack after school, you can read that—you can pick it up, read it, and understand what I'm trying to say.

STUDENT #4: Obviously, if we're writing in college, it's going to try and impress my professor as much as possible. And so that is my primary audience. But it's also understanding that if my paper is picked up by someone else, that I'm clearly defining certain terms. So even the person who hasn't read the book or the article I'm writing on, they won't be completely lost.

STUDENT #5: The best thing a writing teacher has ever done for me in my college career was to sit me down and enlighten me on the fact that I can do whatever I want with this piece and to put emotion into it so it doesn't sound dull to your readers. She helped me really reach my audience.

GREGG: If you're doing work that you plan on publishing, ultimately your stakes are going to be higher, again, because there's a larger audience. You're not just going through the A. And in shooting for a publishable work, your A is going to happen because the publishing companies, or wherever the peer reviews that you're going to have to go through for that, are going to be much more significant than just that classroom paper.

KENDRA: I think the audience changes with the type of writing you're doing. If you're just writing a story, or like a personal experience, or something, you have to add a lot of the background information so that people can follow it. But then as I started doing scientific writing, I learned that the audience is more professionals looking just to get more knowledge. But they already have a lot of the background, so you have to cut that out.