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2e Analyzing audiences

2eAnalyzing audiences

Contents:

Imagining audiences for informal writing

Imagining audiences for formal and academic writing

Appealing to your whole audience

Video Prompt: Developing a sense of audience

Every writer can benefit from thinking carefully about who the audience is, what the audience already knows or thinks, and what the audience needs and expects to find out. One of the characteristic traits of an effective writer is the ability to write for a variety of audiences, using language, style, and evidence appropriate to particular readers. The key word here is appropriate: just as you would be unlikely to sprinkle jokes through a PTA presentation on child abuse, neither would you post a detailed and academic argument in response to a blog filled with funny cat pictures. Such behavior would be wildly inappropriate given the nature of your audience.

Thinking systematically about your audience can help you make decisions about a writing assignment. For example, it can help you decide what sort of organizational plan to follow, what information to include or exclude, and even what specific words to use. If you are writing an article for a journal for nurses about a drug that prevents patients from developing infections from intravenous feeding tubes, you will not need to give much information about how such tubes work or to define many terms. But if you are writing about the same topic in a pamphlet for patients, you will have to give a great deal of background information and define (or avoid) technical terms.

What person or group do you most want to reach? Is this audience already sympathetic to your views?
How much do you know about your audience? In what ways may its members differ from you? from one another? Consider education, geographic region, age, gender, occupation, social class, ethnic and cultural heritage, politics, religion, marital status, sexual orientation, disabilities, and so on. (See Chapter 28.)
What assumptions can you make about your audience members? What might they value—brevity, originality, conformity, honesty, wit, seriousness, thrift, generosity? What goals and aspirations do they have? Take special care to examine whether distant readers will understand references, allusions, and so on.
What do members of the audience already know about your topic? Do you need to provide background information or define terms?
What kind of information and evidence will the audience find most compelling—quotations from experts? personal experiences? photographs? statistics?
What stance do your audience members have toward your topic? What are they likely to know about it? What views might they already hold?
What is your relationship to the audience?
What is your attitude toward the audience?

Imagining audiences for informal writing

For some informal writing—a Facebook message to a friend, for example—you know exactly who your audience is, and communicating appropriately may be a simple matter. It’s still worth remembering that when you post informal writing in a public space—whether on a friend’s Facebook page, in a blog’s comment section, or on Twitter—you may not be aware of how large and varied your online audience can be. Can your friend’s parents, or her employer, see your posts? (The answer depends on how she manages her privacy settings.) Who’s reading the blogs you comment on or following your tweets?

In a famous cartoon by Peter Steiner, one dog tells another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” However, as online privacy becomes less common—and as online writers become more likely to grant large audiences access to their thoughts, including everyone from old high school classmates and former co-workers to beer buddies and members of their church—maintaining distinct identities is more difficult. On the Internet today, some writers have suggested, everyone knows you’re a dog, whether you want them to or not!

Imagining audiences for formal and academic writing

Even if you write with intuitive ease in tweets and texts to friends, you may struggle when asked to write for an instructor or for a general audience. You may wonder, for example, why you need to define terms in your writing that your instructor has used in class, or what you can assume a general audience knows about your topic. When you are new to academic writing, making such assumptions can be tricky. If you can identify samples of writing that appeal to an audience similar to the one you are writing for, look for clues about what level of knowledge you can assume; if still in doubt, check with your instructor.

Members of your class will also usually be part of your audience, especially if you are responding to one another’s drafts in peer review. You may also have a chance to identify an audience for your assignment—perhaps a business proposal addressed to a hypothetical manager or a Web presentation posted for an online audience that is potentially global. In each case, it pays to consider carefully how your audience(s) may respond to the words, images, and other elements you choose.

Appealing to your whole audience

All writers need to pay very careful attention to the ways in which their writing can either invite readers to be part of the audience or leave them out. Look at the following sentence: As every schoolchild knows, the world is losing its rain forests at the rate of one acre per second. The writer here gives a clear message about who is—and who is not—part of the audience: if you don’t know this fact or suspect it may not be true, you are not invited to participate and, as a result, may feel insulted.

You can help make readers feel they are part of your audience. Be especially careful with the pronouns you use, the assumptions you make, and the kinds of support you offer for your ideas.

Use appropriate pronouns. The pronouns you use (see Chapter 41) can include or exclude readers. When bell hooks says “The most powerful resource any of us can have as we study and teach in university settings is full understanding and appreciation of the richness, beauty, and primacy of our familial and community backgrounds,” she uses “us” and “we” to connect with her audience—those who “study and teach in university settings.” Using “us” and “we” to speak directly to your audience, however, can sometimes be dangerous: those who do not see themselves as fitting into the “we” group can feel left out—and they may resent it. So take special care with the pronouns you use to refer to your readers.
Avoid unfounded assumptions. Be careful what you assume about your readers and their views, and avoid language that may unintentionally exclude readers. Use words like naturally and of course carefully, for what seems natural to you—that English should be the official U.S. language, for instance, or that smoking should be outlawed—may not seem at all natural to some members of your audience. Try to take nothing about your audience for granted.
Offer appropriate evidence. The evidence you use to support your arguments can help draw in your readers. A student writing about services for people with disabilities might ask readers who have no personal experience with the topic to imagine themselves in a wheelchair, trying to enter a building with steps but no ramp. Inviting them to be part of her audience would help them accept her ideas. On the other hand, inappropriate evidence can leave readers out. Complex statistical evidence might well appeal to public-policy planners but may bore or irritate ordinary citizens. (For more on building common ground with readers, see Chapter 28.)

Emily Lesk’s audiences

In addition to her instructor, Emily Lesk’s audience included the members of her writing class and her potential online readers. Emily saw that her classmates were mostly her age, that they came from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and that they came from many areas of the country. Her online readers could be almost anyone.

Considering Disabilities: Your whole audience