Any piece of writing is shaped by external factors before the first word is ever set down on the page. This rhetorical situation, or rhetorical context, can be presented in the form of a pyramid.

The three key factors—purpose, author, and audience—all work together to influence what the text itself says, and how it says it.

Purpose

Any time you are preparing to write, you should first ask yourself, “Why am I writing?” All writing, no matter the type, has a purpose, or exigence, or stakes: these are all common terms for this concept. Purpose will sometimes be given to you by an instructor—college instructors often ask you to construct a well-reasoned and persuasive argument, and sometimes they give you quite specific questions to address, or sources, evidence, or methods to use. At other times, you will decide your stakes for yourself: this task can seem daunting to an undergraduate student, but part of what you are learning to do at college is not only to understand what others think, but to formulate your own thoughts and pose your own questions about topics whose purpose you yourself find galvanizing, exciting, or profound. As the author, it’s up to you to make sure that the purpose of your writing is clear not only to yourself, but also—especially—to your audience. If your purpose is not clear, your audience is not likely to receive your intended message. College writing is not just “telling” your reader something; rather, it’s conversational in the sense that you are making meaning out of evidence, and offering up your analysis to the broader scholarly community, which means that the community needs to know why what you’re saying matters and why your peers should care.

There are, of course, many different reasons to write (e.g., to inform, to entertain, to persuade, to ask questions), and you may find that some writing has more than one purpose. When this happens, be sure to consider any conflict between purposes, and remember that you will usually focus on one main purpose as primary. Try not to imagine your primary purpose as fulfilling an assignment to earn a grade, since that’s a generic and pretty uninspiring purpose to apply to everything you write at college; focus instead on academic goals such as persuasion and analysis which will develop you as a thinker and writer, regardless of the particular topic of your essay. 

Why Purpose Matters

• If you’ve ever listened to a lecture or read an essay and wondered “so what?” then you know how frustrating it can be when an author’s purpose is not clear. By clearly defining your purpose before you begin writing, it’s less likely you’ll be that author who leaves the audience wondering.
• If readers can’t identify the purpose in a text, they usually quit reading. You can’t deliver a message to an audience who quits reading.
• If instructors can’t identify the purpose in your text, they might assume you didn’t understand the assignment.

Audience

To some extent, naturally, you need to think about the audience you’re writing for and adapt your writing approach to their needs, expectations, backgrounds, and interests. Being aware of your audience helps you make better decisions about what to say and how to say it. For example, you have a better idea if you will need to define or explain any terms if you consider that your audience consists of your supportive, but non-Psychology-major friends at a GREAT Day panel (Geneseo’s annual public showcase of outstanding student work), rather than of your classmates in a 300-level seminar specializing in developmental psychopathology. Or, you can make a more conscious effort not to say or do anything that would make your audience lose confidence in your judgment when you know that most of your audience will find your— for example, political—argument counterintuitive.  

Sometimes you know who will read your writing—for example, if you are writing an email to the supervisor of your internship. Other times you will have to guess who is likely to read your writing—for example, if you are writing an editorial for The Lamron. You will often write with a primary audience in mind, but there may be secondary and tertiary audiences to consider as well. In an academic context, although you know that on one level you are writing for your instructor, try to imagine your primary audience as a more broadly academic one. Imagine an educated reader—someone who may not ever have thought about your particular essay topic, but who is intellectually curious enough to become interested in any piece of writing whose purpose is clear and whose level of sophistication moves at an appropriate pace through introductory material and then on to more nuanced, detailed, or complex claims.

Be sophisticated about the role of your audience. The following list suggests some points that might contribute to a profile of your audience, but you should balance those points against the danger of getting trapped by a too concrete, too external sense of what drives your writing. In his classic writing guide, Writing with Power, Peter Elbow comments,

When you attend to audience from the start and let your words grow out of your relationship with it, sometimes you come up with just what you need, and in addition your words have a wonderful integrity or fit with that audience. Everything is on target. But sometimes the effect is opposite. The audience hinders your writing by exerting too much pull on you (or intimidating you). And occasionally when you think too much about audience, your words are too heavy with audience-awareness. Your words feel too much like those of a salesman who is trying too hard to make “audience contact.” (194)

^[1]

What to Think About

Bearing Elbow’s advice in mind, consider these points when analyzing your audience. Creating a profile of your audience can help guide your writing choices.

Background Knowledge or Experience — In general, you don’t want to merely repeat what your audience already knows about the topic you’re writing about; you want to build on it. On the other hand, you don’t want to talk over their heads. Anticipate their amount of previous knowledge or experience based on elements like their profession, level of education, or age. At college, many written assignments expect you to imagine an educated and curious but non-expert reader who will be able to progress rapidly in knowledge if you provide the necessary information: someone just like you. Be careful about assuming that your instructor is your primary audience; undergraduate students often create gaps in logic or knowledge if they work from the assumption that their instructor already knows everything and that they therefore don’t need to, or shouldn’t, set up any background. Logically, background information should come towards the start of your essay, but not necessarily at the very start where it can read like random facts. Frame background information by how it relates to your thesis.

Expectations and Interests — Your audience may expect to find specific points or writing approaches, especially if you are writing for faculty or a boss. Consider not only what they do want to read about, but also what they do not want to read about. It is completely appropriate to ask a college instructor about their expectations, especially if you have a specific question, such as whether a relevant personal anecdote would be appropriate, or whether you should be using research materials in your assignment, or graphics, or how they feel about using the first person pronoun (“I”).  

Attitudes and Biases — Your audience may have predetermined feelings about your topic, which can affect how hard you have to work to win them over or appeal to them. If they expect to disagree with you, they will look for evidence that you have considered their side as well as your own. It’s good academic practice to include and treat respectfully such counterarguments in any essay, however, even if you think your audience will share your basic outlook on the topic. Academic arguments are contestable, meaning that they aren’t just facts arranged in sentences, but rather positions you’ve taken after considering the evidence.

Demographics — Consider what else you know about your audience, such as their age, gender, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, political preferences, religious affiliations, job or professional background, and area of residence. Think about how these demographics may affect how much background your audience has about your topic, what types of expectations or interests they have, and what attitudes or biases they may have. Don’t get caught up in thinking too hard about one particular reader, though: keep that general, educated reader in mind. 

Applying Your Analysis to Your Writing

Here are some general rules to apply your thinking about audience to the writing moves you make.^[2]

Change the register of the information you currently have. Even if you have the right information, you might be explaining it in a way (a “register”) that doesn’t make sense to your audience. For example, you wouldn’t want to use highly advanced or technical vocabulary in a document for first-grade students or even in a document for a general audience, such as the audience of a daily newspaper, because most likely some (or even all) of the audience wouldn’t understand you.

Add examples to help readers understand. Sometimes just changing the register of information you have isn’t enough to get your point across, so you might try adding an example. If you are trying to explain a complex or abstract issue, you might offer a metaphor or an analogy to something readers are more familiar with to help them understand. Or, if you are writing for an audience that disagrees with your stance, you might offer examples that create common ground and help them see your perspective.

Change the level of your examples. Once you’ve decided to include examples, you should make sure you aren’t offering examples your audience finds unacceptable or confusing. For example, some instructors find personal stories unacceptable in academic writing, so you might use a metaphor instead. Metaphors, however, may distract your reader from the purpose of your argument if you reserve too much textual space for them. Use them to supplement, not replace, the contents of your argument. There’s no magic bullet for appealing to every audience.

Strengthen transitions. You might make decisions about transitions based on your audience’s expectations. For example, most instructors expect to find topic sentences, which serve as transitions between paragraphs. In a shorter piece of writing such as a memo to co-workers, however, you would probably be less concerned with topic sentences and more concerned with transition words. In general, if you feel your readers may have a hard time making connections, providing transition words (e.g., “therefore” or “on the other hand”) can help lead them.

Write stronger introductions – both for the whole document and for major sections. Academic readers like to get the big picture up front. Offer this vital information in your introduction and thesis statement, and reiterate it in smaller introductions to major sections within your document. In a document that doesn’t have sections, topic sentences (the first sentences of a paragraph) function much the same way an introduction does – they offer readers a preview of what’s coming and how that information relates to the overall document and your overall purpose.

Author

The final unique aspect of anything written down is who it is, exactly, that does the writing. You can harness the aspects of yourself that will make the text most effective to its audience, for its purpose. Tap into your own strengths, but remember also that your ability to manage the conventions of standardized English, including essay structure, spelling, and grammar, affect how much an academic audience perceives you as an effective author. The words author and authority share the same root for a reason.

Analyzing yourself as an author allows you to clarify, either to your audience or just to yourself, why your audience should pay attention to what you have to say, and why they should listen to you on the particular subject at hand. It is more appropriate in some writing scenarios than others to describe yourself explicitly; in many college assignments, you might not even use “I,” but having thought deliberately about yourself as the author of a paper on any topic is a valuable academic habit of mind. Again, the motivation you bring to an essay should be more than needing to get a grade to pass the course! A liberal arts education places most students in varying states of knowledge, motivation, and comfort regarding a topic, so use that variety to learn about yourself as an author in different contexts.

Questions for Consideration

• What personal motivations do you have for writing about this topic?
• What background knowledge do you have on this subject matter?
• What personal experiences directly relate to this subject? How do those personal experiences influence your perspectives on the issue? How would you describe yourself demographically?
• What formal training or professional experience do you have related to this subject?
• What skills do you have as a communicator? How can you harness those in this project?
• What should audience members know about you, in order to trust what you have to tell them? How will you convey that in your writing?

Consider, though, that as with Peter Elbow’s advice above about imagining a specific audience, forming too concrete a profile of yourself as author can also feel restrictive. The authorial self you project in your standardized English, academic, college-level essays is a constructed self, functioning in a specific, constructed space. As another writing theorist, Steven Pinker, says,

Writing is above all an act of pretense. We have to visualize ourselves in some kind of conversation, or correspondence, or oration, or soliloquy, and put words into the mouth of the little avatar who represents us in this simulated world. ^[3]