The Audience in the Text

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Who are my readers? As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon thinking about the concept of audience in a composition class, I am struck anew at both the centrality and the difficulty of this idea. Do I think of my readers as Plato and Aristotle seemed to think of the rhetor’s audience, as something to be mastered, susceptible listeners capable of persuasion provided I know how to persuade them? Or do I think of my readers as Blair or Campbell might have imagined them—intelligent, logical, rational, a bit skeptical but open to persuasion through effective argumentation? Or do I think of my readers as Walter Ong suggests I should, as a fiction, a mere construct of my mind created by me to serve my purposes?

Maybe I could figure out how to address my audience better if I knew more about them. Perhaps if I knew this audience that I am addressing I would better know what they wanted to read, what pleased them or displeased them, what persuaded them and what bored them. This approach focuses on the “real world,” where writing has clear and obvious purposes and where readers are specific and knowable. Not surprisingly, this idea of audience is popular in business and technical writing. The entrepreneur is encouraged to think of the banker who will read the business plan and decide on a loan. The engineer is encouraged to think of the accountant who will read the project proposal and decide on funding. Both the banker and the accountant are actual people and at least in theory knowable.

Or maybe I can never know my readers because they don’t exist until I invoke them. Maybe this “audience invoked” by my rhetorical choices is the only audience that exists. When the narrator in Middlemarch states, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (italics added), we (the novel’s readers) long to be part of the we invoked by the narrator, a community of readers full of wisdom, generosity, and humanity. We become the readers Eliot’s narrator wants us to become, but we don’t exist until the narrator invokes us.

But what if I don’t see myself as part of the narrator’s we? Similarly, what if my readers reject my attempts to construct them? Certainly readers are both actual physical people about whom I could learn more and constructs brought into partial being by my choices as a writer. Readers are both active as in the “audience addressed” model and passive as in the “audience invoked” model.

It might be tempting to narrow our conception of audience to something manageable, and in fact as teachers we often do. Students can grasp the idea of readers—other people with other backgrounds, experiences, opinions, and ideas—because they are themselves readers struck at times by the foreignness of the texts we ask them to read. They know first-hand the experience of being not merely the “audience addressed” but the “audience unaddressed.” Their confusion as readers, though, makes real the duties and responsibilities faced by any writer (including student writers) whose primary purpose is to communicate.

In short, like all rhetoric it comes down to choices. To some degree a writer chooses his or her readers, fashions them, imagines them, invokes them. But equally important is whether the writer chooses to acknowledge his or her readers, accept them, speak to them, meet them where they are in order to advance them.

Some Common Ways of Thinking About Audience

Aristotle: “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” [This formulation of ethos, pathos and logos is seen as emphasizing speaker (ethos), audience (pathos), and speech art (logos).]

Walter Ong: “The historian, the scholar or scientist, and the simple letter writer all fictionalize their audiences, casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play the role assigned.”

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: “The most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer.”

Lester Faigley: “The social perspective . . . moves beyond the traditional rhetorical concern for audience, forcing researchers to consider issues such as social roles, group purposes, communal organization, ideology, and finally theories of culture.”

Teaching Invention

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Journal writing, topoi, stasis theory, Burkean pentads, clustering, brainstorming, listing, tagmemics, double-entry notebooks, cubing, freewriting, hermeneutics. Beginning in the mid-1960s, renewed interest in the rhetorical concept of invention (or prewriting as most teachers of writing refer to it) led to an explosion of invention strategies for the classroom. The first Composition Conversation of the Winter term focused on “Teaching Invention,” and began with a simple question: What strategies are taught in the classroom? The answers revealed a key distinction. Developmental students benefited from basic “unconscious” prewriting strategies such as journals, freewriting, and listing while first-year composition students benefited most from “conscious” activities that helped them understand and respond to texts.

Since invention helps writers figure out what to say, it is closely tied to the writing task. First-year writing classes (i.e. ENGL 101 and 102) emphasize careful reading of often complex arguments in disciplinary texts and writing that must directly respond to these arguments. Participants agreed on the importance of discussing reading assignments in depth, noting that students needed to know “what they were responding to” to begin formulating effective responses.

One instructor illustrated this process by describing a recent classroom activity. Students watched a documentary critical of gender representations in Disney films. To begin, the class was asked to sum up the criticisms articulated in the film. They were then asked to “switch sides” and offer counter-arguments to these criticisms. Then they were asked to offer counter-arguments to the counter-arguments and the process continued. Most teachers of writing employ similar strategies to help students examine arguments critically and develop their own resources for analyzing and inventing arguments.

Developmental students (i.e. ENGL 095 or 096), of course, also benefit from attention to reading and argument, but they often need to examine their own writing process. Perhaps because developmental writers are more likely to have had negative experiences with writing (or more specifically with writing instruction), they are more likely to suffer from writer’s block or writing anxiety. For these writers, successful prewriting strategies disable the “conscious” filter and allow them to tap “unconscious” knowledge.

Such strategies postpone the imposition of rules and conventions as one participant paraphrased Mike Rose. Keeping a journal, freewriting, and other “editor-disabling” invention strategies, help students write their way to their ideas. To be successful these strategies need to emphasize speed and be “low-stakes.” For example, one participant described a freewriting exercise where students were told that their writing was entirely for themselves. Later students were asked to freewrite again and told that other students would read their freewrite. The results were predictable: students performed the first low-stakes freewrite easily and struggled with the second.

Ultimately, teaching invention is inseparable from helping students recognize their own writing processes, and how those processes can be made more effective and efficient. Invention helps writers tap knowledge they already have and understand knowledge available from others. It helps a writer figure out what to say, which is another way of saying it enables a writer to know what he or she knows. Is there any greater knowledge?

Some Key Invention Terms

Assessing the Rhetorical Situation-—audience, purpose, genre and conventions

Brainstorming-—thinking out loud in a group

Classical-—ethos, logos, pathos (types of appeals), topoi (topics of invention), stasis (determining the issue), dissoi logoi (arguing both sides)

Clustering-—a visual form of listing

Cubing-—describe it, compare it, associate it, analyze it, apply it, argue for or against it

Double-entry notebook-—summary/response journal

Dramatism (Burke’s Pentad)-—heuristics to determine motive: Act (What is happening?), Agent (Who is doing it?), Agency (What method?), Purpose (What is the intent?), Scene (Where?)

Freewriting-—an attempt to tap unconscious knowledge

Journalist’s Questions-—who, what, when, where, why, how

Journal Writing-—record of daily observations, responses to reading/ideas

Listing-—free association of ideas in point form

Outlining-—informal or formal listing of ideas

Scratch Outlines-—like “listing” but with some attention paid to sequence and subordination

Tagmemics-—examine the surface (‘particle’), dynamic (‘wave’), and comparative (‘field’) aspects of a topic

Designing Effective Writing Assignments

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The many pedagogic resources available on designing effective writing assignments mostly agree on the importance of beginning with three questions:

Why? Why are students being asked to write?

For whom? Who is the audience for the writing?

What? What form will the finished product take?

These three questions, of course, correspond to purpose, audience, and genre, and an effective assignment will help students identify the purpose, audience, and genre of their writing.

While instructors might believe that the purpose of an assignment is clear, most inexperienced writers have difficulty identifying their purpose for writing. Often they believe their purpose is to complete an assignment, which leads to safe and disengaged responses. Consider providing a succinct statement of purpose, such as “Your purpose in writing this essay is to identify the main proposals for transforming the Los Angeles River, and then argue for the approach that you believe will be most effective.”

Many instructors are already including information about audience in their topics. It is not surprising, for example, to find a statement like the following on an essay assignment sheet: “While it is tempting to think that you are writing to me, the instructor, you should consider the entire class to be your audience.” Such advice is certainly a start, but students often find imaginary scenarios helpful, such as writing a letter to a public official or submitting a report to a campus group. Such scenarios, while obviously artificial, help students recognize the demands that real audiences can make. Courses that incorporate community engagement move one step beyond these artificial “real-world” scenarios to actual writing tasks (such as producing memos, brochures, user instructions and other documents) produced for flesh-and-blood readers.

As to the form of the finished product, we can be most helpful to students by being as explicit about our expectations as possible without being so directive and limiting that students are left with a “fill-in the blanks” assignment. Format, page length, process, even “pet peeves” about style and grammar should be stated upfront. If I believe that the only appropriate use of the word “thing” in a student essay is a reference to a 1951 film about vegetable-based aliens, then I should state that expectation on the assignment. In short, if students are expected to use certain forms and follow certain conventions, they should be instructed to do so.

Thinking about these three questions is only one way of approaching assignment design. We might also think about the assignment as it might be seen by our students. From the student’s perspective, the key questions might be

1. What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What skills, knowledge, and/or abilities am I supposed to demonstrate?
2. What exactly am I supposed to do? What is the central task?
3. What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
4. Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
5. How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
   

While effective writing assignments take time and effort to create, well-planned assignments are not only easier for students to do, they are easier for the instructor to grade.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing? Is this purpose do able?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing? What do they need to know about this genre to be comfortable and successful?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do or what at a minimum must they address?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without being overly directive and limiting?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps, or process, that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment? Of these, which are most important?