Good writing, especially when the intention is to persuade, focuses the message on what the audience most needs to hear, not on what the author wants to say. But how do we know what the audience needs to hear? Who is the audience, anyway?

This is a trickier question for a piece of writing than for a speech or presentation. When you give a live speech, there are actual people in the room (or in the virtual audience online). Before walking into a speaking situation, you would probably try to get some sense of who you’re talking to. And if the expected audience of graduate students turns out to be a group of fifth graders, you’d most likely change your speech on the fly.  When you’re writing, however, the reader may not be so present in your thinking. However, it’s important to have some conception of your reader so that you know which kinds of arguments are going to be most persuasive.

Identifying the audience of a live speech is fairly straightforward.

Even though they’re not in the room, it’s important to keep the audience of your writing in mind.

Consider this example. You are tasked with writing a proposal for a community playground in an underserved community. Before you begin writing, first determine who you are writing for. Who are the decision makers involved in the funding and execution process? City Council? The mayor? Residents of surrounding neighborhoods? Will your proposal be made public? Make a list of possible audiences for your proposal and describe what you know and what you need to learn about each group.

Factors to consider:

• Expectations: Why are they reading this? The first question you could ask of your imaginary readership is, why are they reading this? What do they expect to read and what do they hope to learn?
• Prior experience with the topic: What do they know already? Another extremely important factor to consider is the readers’ prior experience with the topic you’re discussing. This experience can take many forms. One form would be technical, theoretical, or academic knowledge of the subject. Another would be first-hand, observational, or practical experience. For instance, if you were writing about the criminal justice system for a group of sociologists, you could assume a high level of theoretical knowledge about various methodologies of modeling social systems, but not necessarily an understanding of how the system is experienced by an individual trying to negotiate the court system. If you were presenting the same information to a group of people who had all been in prison, you could assume a high level of experience with the criminal justice system, but not necessarily a familiarity with sociological models of this system.
• Attitude toward the topic: Where do they stand? Generally speaking, the readers’ attitude toward the topic you are presenting can be grouped into a few categories. Audiences are said to be friendly if you can assume they would be inclined to agree with your assumptions and argument. A hostile audience, on the other hand, would not agree with your conclusions unless the listeners were convinced by your argument. For instance, if you were arguing in favor of a tax on carbon emissions, an environmentalist organization might be considered a friendly audience, whereas a group of oil and gas executives could be a hostile audience.  Finally, if an audience is neither friendly nor hostile, it may be neutral (not having strong inclinations one way or another) or mixed (containing both friendly and hostile readers—and probably neutral readers as well).
• Frame of reference: Where are they coming from? A frame of reference describes the assumptions, values, and standards by which a person evaluates a particular idea or position. In large part, audience analysis involves trying to learn about your readers’ frames of reference—cultural, philosophical, religious, demographic, economic, and so on. It is extremely important, however, to avoid jumping to conclusions about your listeners’ values, standards, and experiences based on your analysis of the audience.

But Who Is this Essay Really For?

Who is the audience of your paper? Your professor?

You may find yourself a bit confused by this discussion of audiences, since most of your papers in college seem to have an audience of one: your professor. But what would it mean to write directly to that audience? Your professor definitely wouldn’t be happy with a research paper that started like this:

“Last week in the class discussion we talked about supply and demand curves, and when I was thinking about this paper I remembered something you said about inelastic demand and decided to write about that.”

Although this style might work for an online discussion board or an email, it wouldn’t be appropriate in an academic essay. The reason why has to do with a peculiar feature of academic writing (and really, to some degree, of all writing): often, the audience of an essay isn’t a real group of actual readers; it’s a constructed or imagined audience based on a set of assumptions. In the case of papers for class, this constructed audience is usually understood as typical, interested, educated readers. As one textbook puts it: “you’re trying to make your topic relevant and interesting to people who share in your own ‘discourse community.'” (Ballenger 20)

When you’re beginning work on an academic writing assignment, it can be helpful to establish what kind of audience your writing would have. How do you know if you’re writing for a “real” audience or a constructed one? (Ede and Lunsford) The answer probably lies in the assignment. Assignments that want you to address a specific audience are usually “real world” writing: a letter to someone you know, a memo to a boss, a letter to the editor expressing your view on something. In all of these cases, it’s crucial to know something about the actual people who would be reading it. When writing an op-ed in the newspaper, for instance, we would want to know something about the political leanings of the newspaper’s subscribers. Otherwise we risk losing the audience from the outset. If no audience is specified—that is, if the professor seems to be the primary reader—then you are actually writing for a “constructed” audience. That is, you are not addressing the professor (for instance: “since you are an expert on Caribbean literature, you already know the plot to Prospero’s Daughter, so we can skip to the analysis…”). Instead, this kind of paper speaks to theoretical audience of well-informed academic peers and adheres to what are called the conventions of academic writing (we’ll take a closer look at these conventions soon).