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Now let's talk about questions we can ask concerning the audience of the piece. So these are a few questions concerning the audience the piece. First question, what audience does the author seem to be trying to reach? Second question, what type of reader would be attracted to the author's writing? And what type would be alienated by it? Third question, how does your sense of the text audience influence your reading of the piece? Okay, so let's think about these audience is one of the most important concepts in writing. an author's sense of audience will greatly affect among other things, the language they use, the material they include, and the organizational strategy that they employ. However, audience can be a difficult term to define. In one sense, it refers to actual people a writer may know. When composing a letter to a friend, for instance, a writer can make fairly accurate predictions about the way their reader will react to what they say or the language they use. In another sense, though, audience can have very little to do with specific people the author has in mind as they write a text. Much of what you read in college, for example, was written by people who possessed a much more nebulous sense of audience as they compose their texts. And as they wrote, they knew the type of reader they were trying to address. For example, a first year student taking an introductory geology course the type of student they were trying to address, or perhaps the type of reader they wanted to interest. For example, people curious about feminist interpretations of literature or what have you, when writing they did not have in mind as their audience a specific individual reader. Instead, they were trying to produce prose that would attract or interest a particular type of reader. Therefore, as you read and reread material, try to determine the audience the author is trying to address. How are they attempting to interest or appeal to that type of reader? That's something you can think about a question you can ask, and how successful are they in achieving their goal, or goals of producing prose or trying to produce prose that would attract or interest particular types of readers? Therefore, as you read and reread material, try to determine the audience the author's trying to address? So how are they attempting to interest or appeal to that type of reader? That's the question you can ask. How successful are they in achieving that goal? Or goals? Pay attention to the language and the content and the organization of the piece as you try to answer questions such as those and also the ease. So another question, was the author trying to reach a general reader, an educated reader, or a specialist? And how can you tell what evidence can you call from the text to support your claim or your ideas about the audience? Another question, what language does the author use to try to reach this audience? Is there specific verbiage, certain terminology, perhaps specialized? Is there a presumption or can you read as a kind of subtext, a presupposition that this author is writing to a group of people and identity of reader that has a an existing backdrop of knowledge which they'll be able to reference as they read through the text? Or is everything explained, making no presumptions and assumptions about the readership so as to possibly hypothesize that the author is trying to reach a general audience and therefore attract a general non specialized reader? On that note, another question you can ask is, what type of reader would actually find the work helpful or informative, valuable or difficult? Following that another question, would any readers be alienated by the material in this piece?
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And of course why? Or why not? Answering these questions will help you better understand how the text you are reading came to assume its present form. When writing authors choose language examples and the structure they believe will help them achieve their desired effect. On an audience, part of reading a text critically is determining in your mind how successful each writer has been in making these choices. realize too that when you read something you become a member of that writers audience, your response to what you read is extremely important to note, as you try to understand what the author has to say, is the writer communicating their ideas effectively to you? Do you find the material in the piece interesting, or boring, helpful or irrelevant, engaging or even alienating? You know, whatever your response is to the text, that is valuable information that you should consider as part of your textual analysis, or just your general practice of critical reading. Furthermore, what choices has the writer made that led to these responses of yours? Perhaps you could even gauge responses of other people of your peers, friends, family members, set of people that you've chosen to kind of do a research experiment with whoever. In any case, what knowledge or experience is brought to the text can contribute to certain reactions, and that includes your reactions. So ask yourself what knowledge or experience do I do you the reader, whoever you are, bring to the text that contributes to some reaction that occurs. The summative take home message is this. Understanding the complex relationship between the audience and the writer of a text can help you become a more sensitive critical reader.
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