To Whom are you Speaking?

A few thoughts about audience, after observing some people "talking past each other."

I spend a lot of time, maybe more than I should, focusing my writing students on their audience. This is, of course, one of the most urgent, basic steps in any writing project, but I find that the audience discussion often becomes rote, simplistic, lacking nuance. The audience is not identifiable through basic generalization. It is made up of individuals whose immediate circumstances, receptivity, or interest might fluctuate from day to day or moment to moment. I tell my students that if we define the audience as “your professor,” we are going to have a problem. Some days, I (“professor”) am in a good mood. Some days, I am not. Some days I am receptive to your ideas, while on other days, I really don’t want to hear about them. This does not affect how I evaluate a paper’s merits or construction for a grade, but it might affect how a student’s word choices, tone, or approach strike my eye.

The same goes if one were to define the audience as “politicians,” “college students,” “neighbors,” “mom.” How a writer constructs a piece of writing will affect how readers receive that writing, but the writer cannot predict an individual’s mood, life experience, or energy level at any given moment, regardless of whether or not that individual can be defined as part of a group called “educated non-experts with an interest in my field” or whatever category we invent. You have to catch them on their bad day, not their most engaged day.

This conundrum is central to the project but impossible to control for. It also takes on different flavors based on the type of writing. When I work with social scientists presenting their research, I encourage them to approach writing as if the reader is a blank slate. Present the facts, the data, the analysis and the theoretical ideas that frame and inform it. The reader will apply the emotional and cultural weight, as they should, according to their understanding of the world. When I work with humanities scholars, the impulse is slightly different. The goal is to provide understanding of a cultural work or concept that might not have occurred to the reader, but their reader response will play an outsized role. Literary and cultural evidence differs from quantitative evidence and should be treated differently.

That might seem obvious on the surface, but its obviousness is the point. A lot of rhetoric in academia presupposes a neutral audience. Audiences are not neutral because they are people. The person reading your paper, report, story, annotation, novel, phenomenological summary, whatever, might read that one word one way today and another tomorrow.

It’s not a bad thought to keep in mind in daily interactions, either.