Audience

"Audience is always the first, and most important, question for me. Having an audience in mind helps you stay accountable to what you’re trying to do. It helps keep you honest, and it helps you decide the terms of your success or failure in advance, before the thing is out in the world. I think it’s important to every aspect of the writing process, from conceiving an idea to revision."

—Eve Ewing qtd. in Toor. 2020.

Audience is one of the most important considerations when thinking about rhetoric. The audience is the person or persons an author keeps in mind while they are writing; a person (known or unknown), type of person, or group of people (a particular group, even if it is a big one) the author “writes to.” The audience is the person or people an author most hopes to convince at that moment, with that text.

The intended or “target” audience will determine different features of a piece of writing. If the audience is a personal friend or family member, for instance, the author probably knows they can assume both a familiar, informal tone in their writing and a certain amount of shared knowledge and experience (if they mention Marie, there’s no need to explain that Danny is their brother). In some cases an author is writing to and for a double audience (for instance, a letter to a client that they know will also be scrutinized by their boss).

Audience plays an especially important role in determining the shape of public texts. The author of a text generally has a particular audience in mind, but it is understood that a piece of writing may also be read by others beyond the target audience. For instance, a letter to the editor of Turning the Tides, a newspaper from the youth-oriented group Anti-Racist Action, might have several target audiences: the editor (or editors) of the paper, the typical readers of the paper who are (probably) young and devoted to fighting racism. But there might be other ‘incidental’ readers of Turning the Tides: perhaps some White-supremacist groups that ARA targets, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation, actually read the paper to gather information on their opposition, or perhaps there are other, more established anti-racist and civil rights groups, too, who are interested. Perhaps there are legislators in Washington, D.C. who are interested, or perhaps the FBI is keeping an eye on the group and who the various members might be.... (Notice that some of these secondary audiences could be intentional, but not necessarily. Knowing, for instance, that someone you don't intend to share your thinking with is spying on you can, in fact, have an impact on what you say and do.)

In other words, “anybody who is interested” might read any given public text, but people are interested in texts for different reasons, and an author is probably trying to reach a particular group, not “everybody.”

One of our goals for this course is to think about how writers and rhetors can successfully address a variety of needs, situations, and audiences, including for personal, professional, and academic occasions.

eerie faceless cardboard robots with text: "Novice writers may assume that their writing can be directed to a broad, named, faceless audience and that their words can be read and experienced universally by diverse individuals. Not so. Such an assumption contributes to ineffective and boring writing. Writers should tailer their tone, language, and appeals to suit the audience (to whom are you writing?), the purpose (why are you writing and what do you want the read to do after finished your essay?), the medium (how can you help the reader to understand and be attracted to your writing?), and the context (what is the dominant conversation about this topic? What kinds of evidence will be most valued?)."
Image credit: themediapath.com via Writing Commons

Audience, inclusion, and exclusion

We can think about audience as both inclusion and exclusion, or even as helping us see the boundaries between the two. Doing so brings into focus that not everyone has access to the same languages, the same texts, the same platforms for distributing or accessing ideas.

Sometimes we read things that don't work for us—or even make us feel excluded. Writers and rhetors may use terminology and even languages we don't know. That can be a hint: is this meant for me? Does it need to be? We can learn to listen to communications that aren't intended for us, and that can be fine, or frustrating—and it can also be a good thing.

Paying this kind of attention can also highlight how some audiences are in fact excluded—in part because when we say "everybody" or try to be "general," "neutral," or "universal," that tends to mostly mean White, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, English speaking. In other words, an unspecified audience can often lean toward the exclusion of marginalized people.

@yesimhotinthis: "You will not always be the target audience and that's ok" with 4-panel cartoon. 1. Smiling woman in an armchair wearing a head covering says, “Welcome to the first episode of ‘Huda Answers Fan Mail!’ / Let’s dig right in!” 2. Commenter post: “this account sucks.” 3. Frowning, she responds, “What a wonderful comment. / I’ll just politely tell him that he is not always going to be the target audience. / Then I’ll tell him exactly where he can put this account.” She is tap tap tapping on her phone. / 4. Man takes the phone from Huda: “And I think that’ll be the last episode of ‘Huda Answers Fan Mail.’” / Huda replies: “Probably for the best.”

Check out these illuminating ideas from writers and readers speaking specifically about audience, inclusion, and exclusion, particularly in relation to race and status:

"Rather than being inclusive, 'all' is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to 'not make it about race' so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged."

—Cathy Hong Park, Minor Feelings. (84)

* * *

"I’m left wondering what it’s like to put all of this on paper [for Kiese Laymon in his memoir Heavy]. What it’s like to lay himself, his mother, his grandmother and all the others bare for the world to consume.

"'It’s scary,' he says. 'You just want to give a lot of portals of entry to your intended audience, and you just have to hope that they go in some of those doors and look around. But you also have to be aware that some people who are not part of that primary audience might also go in those rooms, and they might fuck up the rooms.'[...]

"'For this book, what I couldn’t do was privilege that audience… I had to count on the possibility that there would be people out there who I really, really wanted to come into the room, and touch it, and write back to us, write back to me.'"

—Sherronda J. Brown. "Interview: Kiese Laymon’s ‘Heavy’ Reminds Us that
Blackness Can Be Abundant in a World Trying to Make Us Disappear."

* * *

"I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. I learned you haven't read anything if you've only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not just the first section, been written to, and for, Baldwin's nephew. I wondered what, and how, Baldwin would have written to his niece. I wondered about the purpose of warning white folk about the coming fire. Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren't writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change."

—Kiese Laymon, Heavy. (143-44)

* * *

"So I imagine I am telling the memoir to my people, and people like me, because that’s the only space where the story thrives, is free and unafraid.

"However, since I am writing in English, everyday I slip and lose sight of my audience."

—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, "On Not Writing for White People."

* * *

"One challenging aspect of Ghosts was that I knew from the beginning that I was trying to write for multiple audiences whose needs might be at odds with one another [... certain academics and scholars, students studying "racism or urban education policy," those who want to become informed about education policy, and] "school folks themselves—organizers, teachers, community members. [...]

"In writing the book, I made a conscious decision: If I ever found myself at a fork in the road regarding those audiences, it would be that final group that would win out. I really needed the book to work for them. And that was scary because I truly didn’t know if academic colleagues would regard this book with disdain or disregard, or think I just wasn’t very smart because I didn’t write a much more opaque book.

"For some academics, inaccessibility is the coin of the realm. For some you prove your expertise by restricting your own legibility to as few people as possible. I just took a deep breath and accepted that this was the choice I was making and if those people didn’t like the book, c’est la vie."

—Eve Ewing, qtd. in Toor.

Works Cited

Want more?

This complex discussion from the WAC Clearinghouse includes a smart treatment of academic audiences and in particular the audience students write for the most (for better or for worse): the teacher. It includes useful tips and impressions from professors in different disciplines.an animated video from TedEd and Hugo Mercier