Audience - Term paper, research paper & custom essay writing service

Home

Audience

Not paying enough attention to your audience is a problem inherent in the nature of writing itself. After all, in speaking we have our audience right there, hearing each word as we speak it. We can scarcely forget its needs. But writing is solitary. The readers aren't with us as we put the words on paper so we are liable to use only our own frame of reference and ignore theirs. By the same token, of course, readers are solitary, too. They don't have us with them as they read and they lack all those cues they would get from watching our movements and hearing our tone of voice and emphasis. In writing we must get the words on the page so clear that there's no need for audio-visual aids. Thus, readers in their solitariness need more of the very thing that writers in their solitariness are most likely to omit. The moral of the story is obvious: pay lots of attention as you write to your audience and its needs. But there's another story. For some of the best writing comes from writers not really worrying so much about audience -- even letting readers flounder a bit -- while they pour all their attention into what they are saying. Look, for example, at the opening of Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning -- fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising and falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said . . . [and so on]. As readers we get little help in knowing what is happening -- we are just plunged into the middle of we're not sure what. More striking still, we get little help in realizing that the beginning of that third paragraph is a flashback (on the sound of door hinges) to thirty years earlier. She is willing for us to flounder for a while and only gradually realize that the location and point of view were changed without warning -- and even more gradually figure out what these new locations and points of view are. She couldn't have been saying to herself, "Let's see, how can I begin this novel so that the poor reader is not lost or perplexed?" If she was thinking consciously about the needs of her audience during this opening paragraph she must have been saying something more like, "How can I start this novel with words so real that readers don't care a hoot about their own needs and are happy to be disoriented." "Beware of Virginia Woolf," you may say. "Only people who are already experts should ever dream of taking her for a model." Perhaps. But probably not. At any rate some of the best writing by beginners comes when they just plunge in with full attention to what they are seeing and saying so that they ignore considerations of audience and point of view. And some of their worst writingboth jumbled and flat -- comes from worrying too much about audience all the time. Blindingly full attention to your meaning is what often gets the audience with you. And yet of course it is also true that the most frequent weakness in the writing of beginners -especially in expository or nonfiction writing -- is too little attention to the needs of the reader. It's so easy to take too much for granted and assume that readers will understand you as they usually do in face-to-face speaking situations. The conclusions then are not obvious about how to think about audience and deal with its needs. Perhaps indeed the theme of this section is paradox.

•	Writing is usually a communication with others. And yet the essential transaction seems to be with oneself, a speaking to one's best self.
•	Sometimes you can't figure out what you want to say and how to say it till you get into the presence of your audience (or think intensely about it). Yet sometimes it's only by getting away from your audience that you can figure out your meaning and how to convey it clearly: your real audience can distract or inhibit you.
•	You can't get an audience to listen and hear you till you have something to say and can say it well. Yet I think the process by which people actually learn to speak and write well is often the other way around: first they get an audience that listens and hears them (parents first, then supportive teachers, then a circle of friends or fellow writers, and finally a larger audience). Having an audience helps them find more to say and find better ways to say it.

By taking account of the complexity involved in matters of audience instead of trying to oversimplify things, I think we can work our way through to some clear conclusions. In each of the following chapters I explore one aspect of audience and I conclude each with concrete practical advice.

•	In sChapter 17, "Other People" I expore how other people are sometimes a "safe" audience which makes it easier for your to communicate well and sometimes a "dangerous" audience which makes it harder.
•	In Chapter 18, "Audience as Focusing Force", I explore the tendency of audiences to suck your words into their point of view. This tendency sometimes is helpful and sometimes must be fought.
•	In Chapter 19, "Three Tricky Audience Situations", I explore the special difficulties of persuasive writing, compulsory writing, and uninvited writing, and then suggest ways to deal with these difficulties.
•	Chapter 20 could have been called "The Trickiest Audience of All", but I called it "Writing for Teachers".

Just as it often feels as though schools and colleges would work much more smoothly if it weren't for students, so it often feels as though writing would go better without audiences to worry about. Yet it may well be (especially if you have already worked hard on your writing) that the one thing your writing needs most is readers. And if you want to give the best gift possible to a writer and you can -- give an audience.

< Prev		Next >

[ Back ]

Service features

24/7 customer support

Written from scratch papers only

Any citation style

Fully referenced

Never resold papers

275 words per page Courier New font

Our benefits

Free extras

Main Menu

Service features