42 Audience
In any text, an author is attempting to engage an audience. Before we can analyze how effectively an author engages an audience, we must spend some time thinking about that audience. An audience is any person or group who is the intended recipient of the text and also the person/people the author is trying to influence. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must examine who the intended audience is by thinking about these things:
- Who is the author addressing?
- Sometimes this is the hardest question of all. We can get this information of “who is the author addressing” by looking at where an article is published. Be sure to pay attention to the newspaper, magazine, website, or journal title where the text is published. Often, you can research that publication to get a good sense of who reads that publication.
- What is the audience’s demographic information (age, gender, etc.)?
- What is/are the background, values, interests of the intended audience?
- How open is this intended audience to the author?
- What assumptions might the audience make about the author?
- In what context is the audience receiving the text?
As readers and writers, we need to ask these questions of any text so that we can understand the rhetorical situation. We need to determine the deep contextual meaning of a text to fully appreciate the argumentative, persuasive, and informative strategies present. Without knowing the context, we’ll fail to understand how an audience would respond to the text. Let’s consider an example to see how analyzing audience can help us understand how writers respond to a rhetorical situation.
Example of Audience Analysis on President Trump’s Inaugural Address:
Inaugural addresses are delivered to “the American people”; one can assume that all Americans are the intended audience. However, Americans were divided at the moment of President Trump’s election, with some voters very happy that he was elected and others upset by it. Those opinions tended to split along party lines: Republicans tended to support Trump, whereas Democrats were critical of him. Republicans may be making the assumption that President Trump would be a great leader; Democrats were likely making the assumption that he would be a bad leader. As a candidate, President Trump (like all political candidates) spent most of his time in speeches trying to rally his base of supporters (his audience – Republican voters). In the inaugural address, he knows that his intended audience, his Republican base, is watching and listening with support. But there may be others who are watching his speech who are not a part of the intended audience, and as president, he likely wishes to engage and to reach out to even the Democrats who rejected him.
In this example, we can see how a writer needs to appeal to audiences’ values and beliefs. However, we can also see how these values and beliefs differ between audiences, which makes persuasion challenging in this rhetorical situation. So, we need additional tools to determine not only what our audience values and believes, but why.
Attributions
“Types of Rhetorical Modes,” Lumen Learning, CC BY-SA, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-writing/chapter/types-of-rhetorical-modes/
“What is the Rhetorical Situation?,” Robin Jeffrey and Emilie Zickel, CC BY 4.0, https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/rhetorical-situation-the-context/.
