What is Audience? The audience is who the speaker is writing for, or who they intend to read their work. As Rosenberg put it, "to whom was he or she implicitly talking"(Rosenberg 213)? Different audiences call for different styles of writing. For example, as I sit here writing to you as incoming freshman, I try to write in a way that would hopefully not bore you to death. I take my experience as a reader and things that would or would not entertain me, and try to work off of that. I write in a conversational tone, rather than an all knowing superior voice. Rosenberg starts off her piece with an anecdote about trying to read but drifting off into daydreams about a cute classmate, which makes it easy for her target audience, students, to relate to. As a fellow student I understand the struggles of trying to stay awake through a long, yawn-inducing text. However, when academics write to other academics they are purely concerned with getting their ideas out and could care less if you as a student are entertained. Being able to identify the audience in readings will help you more effectively read and get the most out of a text and being able to identify your intended audience when you write will help you know how to most effectively get your message across.
Audience in Relation to Your Reading
Rosenberg discusses the all too familiar problem of struggling through an academic text and feeling like you’re drowning. Don’t stress… You aren’t the intended audience. The writer cares about you understanding their writing about as much as you care about the Pythagorean Theorem (sorry math majors), or watching paint dry… they just don’t. It’s up to you as a reader to decode their writing and pull out the main ideas in order to further your understanding and in turn improve your writing. As we discussed earlier, some writers will clearly state their intended audience. Beckman clearly wrote to other students using words like "our" and "us" after identifying himself as a student. Most of the time though it will be up to you to uncover this information.
Audience in Relation to Your Writing Before you put pen to paper, or words on a screen, you need to determine your audience. Knowing who you are writing for determines the rest of your composition. It can change your purpose, structure, tone, etc. To be completely honest with you when I first started writing this, it was intended for my professor. The purpose? I wasn’t entirely sure. I knew I wasn’t trying to teach her something new… that was more of her job. I wasn’t trying to solve a problem for her either, as my professor she pretty much had the whole writing thing down. And then it hit me. I didn’t need to write for her, because she didn’t have a problem that I could solve through discourse (back to the rhetorical situation we discussed earlier). Who could I help with my new-found knowledge? You! People that are standing in the same shoes that I was four weeks ago when I stepped foot into my first college writing class. So here I am. And just as I chose you as my audience when I sat down to write this, you must decide who you are writing for, why you’re writing it, and how you’re going to get your message across.
The rhetorical situation and audience are important and essential building blocks to the bigger picture; composition. Click the button below to learn what composition is and how these elements fit together.