Hi, this is Tony from the UNR Writing and Speaking Center.
Today I want to talk about audience.
When we write an e-mail to an instructor or a text to a friend, we make rhetorical decisions.
We know an instructor most likely expects us to address them more
formally than we speak to our friends.
On the other hand, it may seem strange and even rude to our friends if we started addressing
them the way we would an instructor.
We know to adjust the way we approach these different situations based on our understanding
of the audiences’ expectations, and in social contexts, we often do this automatically.
When we write, however, audience awareness requires more deliberate consideration and
it can be easy to forget we are communicating with actual people.
You may have already learned about audience in a Core Writing course,
but too often, writers see their audience as passive receivers of information, delivered
by the writer, through the text.
In reality, though, meaning is not inherent to the texts you create.
When reading what you’ve written, your audience forms an idea of what you’re saying in their
head based on what’s on the page along with their own knowledge, expectations and values.
This leaves a lot of room for confusion and misunderstanding, so it’s your responsibility
to speak to your audience in a way they will understand.
Consider this video for example.
My audience is UNR students.
Since I’m also a UNR student, I can use words like “we” to be more relatable.
I’m using pretty informal language, but I’m not using a bunch of slang as that
would feel contrived and severely date this resource.
I’m using light-hearted animations to inject some humor into a dry topic and add a visual layer
to compliment the words I’m speaking.
Bottom line, I want to speak to you, not at you.
Now imagine you’re writing a review of a new video game.
Your audience will greatly effect what you write and how you write it.
If you’re writing for a blog, gamers like yourself are your audience.
They’re going to expect you to write about the game play and what you liked and didn’t
like about the game.
You might compare it to other games to give your audience an idea of whether they’d
like this game or not, and using gamer lingo would boost your credibility
by showing your membership in the gamer community.
However, if you’re writing for a course studying digital media
your audience will be academics and cultural critics.
They’ll want you to examine the game as a cultural artifact.
For example, how does it treat violence?
How does it portray authority figures?
They’ll expect you to analyze and make claims about the game and then back those up with evidence.
Using gamer lingo in this situation could
hurt your credibility and open the door for confusion.
Thinking about your audience is one of the best ways to transfer what you learn in school
to future writing situations.
Like in our video game example, every audience comes with unique expectations, knowledge,
and values, and these will effect what you write and how you write it.
If you can understand who your audience is, not as an abstraction, but as actual people
you’re engaging in a conversation, you can take the time to craft your words so they’ll
know exactly what you’re trying to say.