Audience, Purpose and Subject

Before you get started writing, you have to figure out who will be reading your paper and what you want to accomplish in it. In other words, determine your audience and purpose.

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For communication to be effective, whether through speaking or writing, you must consider more than the message itself. As noted in The Brief Penguin Handbook, the speaker and the audience are also essential components of communication (6). This interrelation can be depicted as the rhetorical triangle: speaker/writer audience

subject Faigley et al. explain that these elements are in a dynamic relationship and note that everybody makes adjustments to suit their audience at the time; just as audiences adjust to speakers
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Have a Clear Sense of Audience, Purpose, and Genre

To become a good writer in your field or discipline, as Ken Hyland writes, is to pay close attention to your audience. Think about your rhetorical purpose and the academic standards of the genre in which you are writing. Are you clear about how to meet the expectations of your audience, to explain the purpose of why you are 3/30/12

Audience

Who is your audience? When writing an academic paper, you must not only consider what you want to say, you must also consider to whom you are saying it. In other words, its important to determine not only what you think about a topic, but also what your audience is likely to think. What are your audiences biases and 3/30/12

Addressing Audience

Have you ever tried talking to a blank wall? Try it! We usually find we do not have much to say when talking to a blank wall. Yet, when we do not have an audience in mind when writing, it is the same as talking to a blank wall. It is as important that we know who we are talking to in writing as it is in speaking. Why? So we know what to 3/30/12

It is important to know your audience:

In academic writing, knowing your audience will influence the way that you present material: o Simple audience: If your audience has an academic background similar to yours, you can expect that they are familiar with terms and concepts that you employ. o Multiple audience: If you are writing for a more diverse audience, you need to think about presenting the material to people with differing levels of knowledge about your topic.
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Basic principle:
All collegelevel writing should be directed to a specific intended audience or readership. The following questions can help a writer think about audience: Who is your intended readership? What specific purpose do you hope to accomplish by writing this paper? How are your readers different from you? How are they the same? What is their interest in the subject of your paper, and what stake do they have in that subject? What (if anything) do they already know about the subject? What are their existing attitudes, feelings or prejudices toward you as a writer? What are their existing attitudes, feelings and prejudices about this subject? What expectations will they have for your writing even before they 3/30/12 start to read it?

Sometime our instructors will assign an audience. We need to pay close attention as we read the assignment to see if the audience is given. If it is not assigned, we can ask our instructor if we are to write for a specific audience. If our instructor tells us to pick our own audience,we need to do it. This is especially important in an 3/30/12

How do writersidentifytheir audience(s)?

At this point we will usually have come up with more than one possible audience. The next step is to decide to which of these audiences we will write. For example, if we are writing an essay on energy conservation we might write to any of the following groups of individuals. Each group will probably require a different approach to the presentation of our ideas, and to the selection of ideas we will present, so we would probably want to pick just one of these groups as an audience:

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-National legislators, to get a law passed -Local legislators, to get local ordinances passed -The general public (such as readers of our local newspaper, a national newspaper, or a specific news magazine) to create more public awareness of the issues we 3/30/12 intend to present.

What istone?

Tone,or the tone ofvoicewe use, is as important in writing as it is in speaking. We will use a different tone with legislators than we will with friends or family. We will use one tone with fellow students who share our beliefs and are knowledgeable on our topic, and who we want to join with us in supporting a cause. We will 3/30/12

Knowing your purpose:

Once you have established for whom you write, you must also determine why you write. You have to decide what you want to accomplish: this is your purpose.

Listed here a number of possible reasons:

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To reflect on experience

What is your purpose? If your audience knows less than you do on the topic, your first purpose is often instructional or an informative stance. If the audience knows more than you do, your first purpose is usually to display familiarity, expertise, and intelligence. Be as specific and detail oriented as possible. Dont expect your readers to know what you know. You are the expert in this study. You need to hold 3/30/12 your readers hands so that they can follow

The purpose for our writing essay may be foremost, such as to persuade others to understand a point-of-view on an issue, and possibly be convinced to change their minds on the issue. Then we have to decide whom we want to convince, which is where audience selection comes in. On the other hand, we might have a topic, and even an audience, in mind. Then, if we are going to argue an issue, for example, we need 3/30/12 to decide what we want to persuade this

1. Rhetorical analysis (Brief Penguin Handbook 8384) 3/30/12 also called

When you know the purpose for your text, you can select the appropriate structure and form:
3. Writing to persuade (Brief Penguin Handbook 111-13)

when you are writing to persuade, you are making an argument about your subject written arguments are founded on evidence explore underlying assumptions consider opposing arguments anticipate objections

there are two types of arguments:

a. position argument you state your claim about an issue b. proposal argument you suggest a course of action in response to an issue
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Genre

What is the genre in which you are writing? First, it is most likely academic. If it is a dissertation, your college or university will provide you with guidelines for chapters, sections, etc. If it is an academic paper or a scholarly article, you will be working toward proving a new point, and again the genre of such a work will be made clear by your professor, or the submission guidelines of the journal. If you are unsure of what genre you need to be writing in, ask. Most academic papers require literature reviews, which adhere to their own set of guidelines, as do dissertation proposals, book or article reviews, opinion pieces, etc. Generally, all academic writing is persuasive, and requires you to perform high-level intellectual understanding of the topic through analysis (recognizing patterns suggested by facts), synthesis (producing something new from two or more sources or ideas), and evaluation (judging the quality of a solution, theory, or perspective).

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